The Affirmation

THE AFFIRMATION

by Christopher Priest

Extract from "Sailing to Byzantium," from W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats; and of M. B.

Yeats, Anne Yeats, and Macmillan London Ltd.

Copyright 1981 Christopher Priest

ISBN 0-684-16957-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.

To M.L. and L.M.

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

W. B. YEATS

"Sailing to Byzantium"

THE AFFIRMATION

1

This much I know for sure:

My name is Peter Sinclair, I am English and I am, or I was, twenty-nine years old. Already there is an uncertainty, and my sureness recedes. Age is a variable; I am no longer twenty-nine.

I once thought that the emphatic nature of words ensured truth. If I could find the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion write all that was true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception. To choose too carefully is to become pedantic, closing the imagination to wider visions, yet to err the other way is to invite anarchy into one's mind. If I am to reveal myself then I prefer to do so by my choices, rather than by my accidents. Some might say that such accidents are the product of the unconscious mind, and thus inherently interesting, but as I write this I am warned by what is to follow. Much is unclear. At this outset I need that tedious quality of pedanticism. I have to choose my words with care.

I want to be sure.

Therefore, I shall begin again. In the summer of 1976, the year Edwin Miller lent me his cottage, I was twenty-nine years old.

I can be as certain of this as I am of my name, because they are both from independent sources. One is the gift of parents, the other the product of the calendar. Neither can be disputed.

In the spring of that year, while still twenty-eight, I came to a turning-point in my life. It amounted to a run of bad luck, caused by a number of external events over which I had little or no control. These misfortunes were all independent of each other, yet because they all came together in the space of a few weeks it seemed as if they were part of some terrible conspiracy against me.

In the first place, my father died. It was an unexpected and premature death, of an undetected cerebral aneurysm. I had a good relationship with him, simultaneously intimate and distant; after the death of our mother some twelve years earlier, my sister Felicity and I had been united with him at an age when most adolescents are resisting their parents. Within two or three years, partly because I went away to university, and partly because Felicity and I became alienated from each other, this closeness had been broken. The three of us had for several years lived in different parts of the country, and were together only rarely. Even so, the memories of that short period in my teens lent an unspoken bond between my father and me, and we both valued it.

He died solvent but not rich. He also died intestate, which meant that I had to be involved in a number of tedious meetings with his solicitor. At the end of it all, Felicity and I each received half of his money. It was not large enough to make much difference to either of us, but in my case it was sufficient to cushion me from some of what followed.

Because, in the second place, following a few days after the news of my father's death, I heard that I was soon to be made redundant.

It was a time of recession in the country, with inflating prices, strikes, unemployment, a shortage of capital. Smugly, with my middle-class confidence, I had assumed my degree would insure me against any of this. I worked as a formulation chemist for a flavour house, supplying a large pharmaceutical company, but there was an amalgamation with another group, a change of policy, and my firm had to close my department. Again, I assumed that finding another job would be a mere technicality. I had qualifications and experience, and I was prepared to be adaptable, but many other science graduates were made redundant at the same time and few jobs were available.

Then I was served notice to quit my fiat. Government legislation, by marginally protecting the tenant at the expense of the landlord, had disrupted the forces of supply and demand. Rather than rent property, it was becoming more advantageous to buy and sell. In my case, I rented an apartment on the first floor of a large old house in Kilburn, and had lived there for several years. The house was sold to a property company, though, and almost at once I was told to get out. There were appeal procedures, and I embarked on them, but with my other worries at the time I did not act promptly or effectively enough. It was soon clear I should have to vacate. But where in London could one move to? My own case was far from untypical, and more and more people were hunting for flats in an ever-shrinking market. Rents were going up quickly.

People who had security of tenure stayed put, or, if they moved, transferred the tenancy to friends. I did what I could: I registered with agencies, answered advertisements, asked my friends to let me know if they heard of a place coming free, but in all the time I was under notice to quit I never even got so far as to look at any places, let alone find somewhere suitable.

It was in this context of circumstantial disaster that Gracia and I fell out. This, alone of all my problems, was one in which I played a part, for which I bore some responsibility.

I was in love with Gracia, and she, I believe, with me. We had known each other a long time, and had passed through all the stages of novelty, acceptance, deepening passion, temporary disillusionment, rediscovery, habit.

She was sexually irresistible to me. We could be good company to each other, complement our moods, yet still retain sufficient differences from each other to be surprising.

In this was our downfall. Gracia and I aroused non-sexual passions in each other that neither of us had ever experienced with anyone else. I was normally placid, yet when I was with her I was capable of degrees of anger and love and bitterness that always shocked me, so powerful were they. Everything was heightened with Gracia, everything assumed an immediacy or importance that created havoc. She was mercurial, able to change her mind or her mood with infuriating ease, and she was cluttered with neuroses and phobias which at first I found endearing, but which the longer I knew her only obstructed everything else. Because of them she was at once predatory and vulnerable, capable of wounding and being wounded in equal measure, although at different times. I never learned how to be with her.

The rows, when we had them, came suddenly and violently. I was always taken unawares, yet once they had started I realized that the tensions had been building up for days. Usually the rows cleared the air, and we would make up with a renewed closeness, or with sex. Gracia's temperament allowed her to forgive quickly or not at all. In every case but one she forgave quickly, and the one time she did not was of course the last. It was an awful, squalid row, on a street corner in London, with people walking past us trying not to stare or listen, with Gracia screaming and swearing at me, and I stricken with an impenetrable coldness, violently angry inside but iron-clad outside. After I left her I went home and was sick. I tried to ring her, but she was never there; I could not get to her. It happened while I was job-hunting, flat-hunting, trying to adjust to the death of my father.

Those, then, were the facts, insofar as my choice of words can describe them.

How I reacted to all this is another matter. Nearly everyone has to suffer the loss of a parent at some point in life, new jobs and flats can be found in time, and the unhappiness that follows the end of a love-affair eventually goes away, or is replaced by the excitement of meeting another person. But for me all these came at once; I felt like a man who had been knocked down, then trodden on before he could get up. I was demoralized, bruised and miserable, obsessed with the accumulating unfairness of life and the crushing mess of London. I focused much of my distemper on London: I noticed only its bad qualities. The noise, the dirt, the crowds, the expensive public transport, the inefficient service in shops and restaurants, the delays and muddles: all these seemed to me symptomatic of the random factors that had disrupted my life. I was tired of London, tired of being myself and living in it. But there was no hope in such a response, because I was becoming inward-looking, passive and self-destructive.

Then, a fortunate accident. Through having to sort out my father's papers and letters, I canie in contact again with Edwin Miller.

Edwin was a family friend, but I had not seen him for years. My last memory, in fact, was of him and his wife visiting the house while I was still at school. I must then have been thirteen or fourteen. Impressions from childhood are unreliable: I remembered Edwin, and other adult friends of my parents, with an uncritical sense of liking, but this was second-hand from my parents. I had no opinions of my own. A combination of schoolwork, adolescent rivalries and passions, glandular discoveries, and everything else of that age, must have been making a more immediate impression on me.

It was refreshing to meet him from the vantage of my own adulthood. He turned out to be in his early sixties, suntanned, wiry, full of an unassumed friendliness. We had dinner together at his hotel on the edge of Bloomsbury.

It was still early spring, and the tourist season had barely begun, but Edwin and I were like an island of Englishness in the restaurant. I remember a group of German businessmen at a table near ours, some Japanese, some people from the Middle East; even the waitresses who brought us our portions of roast topside beef were Malaysian or Filipino. All this was emphasized by Edwin's bluff, provincial accent, reminding me irresistibly of my childhood in the suburbs of Manchester. I had grown used to the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of shops and restaurants in London, but it was Edwin who somehow underlined it, made it seem unnatural. I was aware all through the meal of a distracting nostalgia for a time when life had been simpler. It had been narrower, too, and the vague memories were a distraction because not all of them were pleasant. Edwin was a kind of symbol of that past, and for the first half-hour, while we were still exchanging pleasantries, I saw him as representing the background I had happily escaped when I first moved hack to London.

Yet I liked him too. He was nervous of me--perhaps I also represented some kind of symbol to him--and compensated for this by too much generosity about how well I had been doing. He seemed to know a lot about me, at least on a superficial level, and I presumed he had got all this from my father. In the end his lack of guile made me own up, and I told him frankly what had happened to my job. This led inevitably to my telling him most of the rest.

"It happened to me too, Peter," he said. "A long time ago, just after the war. You'd have thought there were a lot of jobs around then, but the lads were coming back from the Forces, and we had some bad winters."

"What did you do?"

"I must have been about your age then. You're never too old for a fresh start. I was on the dole for a bit, then got a job with your dad. That's how we met, you know."

I didn't know. Another residue of childhood: I assumed, as I had always assumed, that parents and their friends never actually met but had somehow always known one another.

Edwin reminded me of my father. Although physically unalike they were about the same age, and shared some interests. The similarities were mostly my creation, perceived from within. It was perhaps the flat northern accent, the intonation of sentences, the manneristic pragmatism of an industrial life.

He was just as I remembered him, but this was impossible. We were both fifteen years older, and he must have been in his late forties when I last saw him. His hair was grey, and thin on the crown; his neck and eyes were heavily wrinkled; there was a stiffness in his right arm, which he remarked on once or twice. He could not possibly have looked like this before, yet sitting there in the hotel restaurant with him I was reassured by the familiarity of his appearance.

I thought of other people I had met again after a period of time. There was always the first surprise, an internal jolt: he has changed, she looks older. Then, within a few seconds, the percep tion changes and all that can be seen are the similarities. The mind adjusts, the eye allows; the ageing process, the differences of clothes and hair and possessions, are edited out by the will to detect continuity. Memory is mistrusted in the recognition of more important identifications. Body-weight might differ, but a person's height or bone-structure do not. Soon it is as if nothing at all has altered.

The mind erases backwards, re-creating what one remembers.

I knew Edwin ran his own business. After a few years working for my father he had set up on his own. At first he had taken on general engineering jobs, but eventually set up a factory that specialized in mechanical valves.

These days his principal customer was the Ministry of Defence, and he supplied hydraulic valves to the Royal Navy. He had intended to retire at sixty, but the business was prospering and he enjoyed his work. It occupied the major part of his life.

"I've bought a little cottage in Herefordshire, near the Welsh border.

Nothing special, but just right for Marge and me. We were going to retire down there last year, but the place needs a lot of doing up. It's still empty."

"How much work is there to do?" I said.

"Mostly redecorating. The place hasn't been lived in for a couple of years. It needs rewiring, but that can wait. And the plumbing's a bit antiquated, you could say."

"Would you like me to make a start on it? I'm not sure I could take on the plumbing, but I'd have a go at the rest."

It was an idea that was sudden and attractive. An escape from my problems had presented itself. In my recently acquired hatred of London, the countryside had assumed a wistful, romantic presence in my mind. Talking about Edwin's cottage, that dream took on a concrete shape, and I became certain that if I stayed in London I would only sink further into the helplessness of selfpity. Everything became plausible to me, and I tried to talk Edwin into renting me his cottage.

"I'll lend it to you free, lad," Edwin said. "You can have it as long as you need it. Provided, of course, you do a spot of decorating, and when Marge and me decide it's time to give it all up, then you'll have to look for somewhere else to go."

"It'll he for just a few months. Long enough to get myself back on my feet."

"We'll see."

We discussed a few details, but the arrangement was finalized in a matter of minutes. I could move down there as soon as I liked; Edwin would mail me the keys. The village of Weobley was less than half a mile away, the garden would have to be looked at, it was a long way to the nearest mainline railway station, they wanted white paint downstairs and Marge had her own ideas about the bedrooms, the phone was disconnected but there was a call-box in the village, the septic tank would have to be emptied and perhaps cleaned out.

Edwin almost forced the house on me once we had convinced each other it was a good idea. It was worrying him while it was empty, he said, and houses were made for living in. He would fix up with a local builder to come in and repair the plumbing, and do some rewiring, but if I wanted to feel I was earning my stay I could do as much of the work as I wished. There was only one proviso: Marge would want the garden done a certain way. They might come down and visit me at weekends, to lend a hand.

In the days that followed this meeting I began to act positively for the first time in several weeks. Edwin had given me the spur, and I moved forward with purpose. Of course I could not move down to Herefordshire straight away, but from the moment I left him everything I did was directly or indirectly towards that end.

It took me a fortnight to free myself of London. I had furniture to sell or give away, books to find a home for, bills to pay and accounts to close. I wanted to be unencumbered after my move; from now on I would have around me only the minimum of things I would need. Then there was the actual move; a rented van and two return trips to the cottage.

Before finally leaving London I made several renewed efforts to locate Gracia. She had moved, and her former flatmate almost slammed the door in my face when I called round to the old address. Gracia wanted never to see me again. If I wrote to her the letter would be forwarded, but I was told not to bother her. (I wrote to her anyway, but no reply came.) I tried the office where she had worked, but she had moved from there too. I tried mutual friends, but either they did not know where she was or else they would not tell me.

All this made me deeply restless and unhappy, feeling that I was unfairly treated. It was a stark reminder of my earlier sense that events were conspiring against me, and much of my euphoria about the cottage was dispelled. I suppose that I had subconsciously imagined moving to the countryside with Gracia, that away from the stresses of city life she and I would not argue, would develop the mature love we had for each other. This buried hope had remained as I organized the details of my move, but with her total repudiation of me at the last minute, it was brought home to me that I was totally alone.

For a few exciting days I had seen myself at a new beginning, but by the time I was finally settled in the cottage all I could think was that I had reached an end.

It was a time for contemplation, for inwardness. Nothing was what I wanted, but all of it had been given to me.

2

The cottage lay in agricultural countryside, about two hundred yards down an unmade lane leading off the road between Weobley and Hereford. It was secluded and private, being surrounded by trees and hedges. The house itself was on two storeys, slate-roofed, whitewashed, mullion-windowed and stable-doored. It had about half an acre of garden, running down at the back to a clean-flowing brook. The previous owners had cultivated fruit and vegetables, but everything was now overgrown. There were small lawns behind and in front of the house, and several flowerbeds. By the brook was an orchard. The trees needed pruning, and all the plants and flowers would have to be cut back and weeded.

I felt possessive of the cottage from the moment I arrived. It was mine in every sense except legal ownership, and without meaning to I began to make plans for it. I imagined weekend parties, my friends driving down from London to enjoy good country food and rural peace, and I saw myself toughening up for the rigours of a less civilized existence. Perhaps I would get a dog, gum-boots, fishing equipment. I determined to learn country crafts: weaving, woodwork, pottery. As for the house, I would soon transform it into the sort of bucolic heaven most townsmen could only dream about.

There was much to be done. As Edwin had told me, the wiring was ancient and inefficient; only two power-sockets worked in the whole house. The pipes gave out a loud knocking whenever I ran the taps, and there was no hot water.

The lavatory was blocked. Some of the rooms were damp; the entire place, inside and out, needed repainting. The floor in the downstairs rooms showed signs of woodworm, and upstairs there was damp-rot in the roof beams.

For the first three days I worked hard at settling in. I opened all the windows, swept the floors, wiped down shelves and cupboards. I poked a long piece of wire down the lavatory, and afterwards peered cautiously under the rusting metal lid of the septic tank. I attacked the garden with more energy than expertise, pulling up by its roots anything I thought might be a weed. At the same time, I made myself known to the general store in Weobley, and arranged for weekly deliveries of groceries to be made. I bought all sorts of tools and utensils I had never needed before: pliers, brushes, a putty-knife, a saw, and for the kitchen a few pots and pans. Then the first weekend arrived. Edwin and Marge came to visit me, and at once my energetic mood vanished.

It was obvious that Edwin's generosity was not shared by Marge. When they arrived I realized that Edwin had been made to regret his friendly offer to me. He stayed apologetically in the background while Marge took control.

She made it clear from the outset that she had her own plans for the cottage, and they did not include someone like me living there. It was nothing she said, it was just implicit in her every glance, every comment.

I barely remembered Marge. In the old days, when they had visited us, it was Edwin who had been dominant. Marge then had been someone who drank tea, talked about her back trouble and helped with the washing up. Now she was a plump and prosaic person, full of conversation and opinions. She had plenty of advice on how to clean the place up, but did none of it herself. In the garden she did more, pointing out what was to be saved, what to be sacrificed to the compost heap. Later, I helped them unload the numerous pots of undercoat and paint they had brought in the car, and Marge explained exactly which colours were to go on which walls. I wrote it all down, and she checked it through.

There was nowhere they could stay in the house, so they had to take a room over the pub in the village. On the Sunday morning, Edwin took me aside and explained that because of a strike of petrol-tanker drivers there were long queues at the motorway filling stations, and if I didn't mind they would leave soon after lunch. It was the only thing he said to me all weekend, and I was sorry.

When they were gone I felt dispirited and disappointed. It had been a painful, difficult weekend. I had felt trapped by them: my gratitude to Edwin, my awkward realization that he had got into hot water with Marge because of it, my continual urges to justify and explain myself. I had had to please them, and I hated the unctuousness I heard creeping into nw voice when I spoke to Marge. They had reminded me of the temporary nature of my residence in the house, that the cleaning up and repairs I was starting were not in the end for myself, but a form of rent.

I was sensitive to the slightest upset. For three days I had forgotten my troubles, but after the visit I rehearsed my recent preoccupations, particularly my loss of Gracia. Her disappearing from my life in such a way--anger, tears, unfinished sentiments--was profoundly upsetting, especially after so long a time together.

I started to brood about the other things I had left behind me: friends, hooks, records, television. I grew lonely, and acutely aware that the nearest telephone was in the village. I waited illogically for the morning mail to arrive, even though I had given my new address to only a few friends and expected to hear from none of them. While in London I had been extensively aware of the world, through reading a daily newspaper, buying several weekly magazines, keeping in touch with friends and listening to the radio or watching television. Now I was cut off from all that. It was through my own designs, and yet, unreasonably, I missed it all and felt deprived. I could of course have bought a newspaper in the village, and once or twice I did, but I discovered my needs were not external. The emptiness was in myself.

As the days passed my gloomy preoccupations intensified. I became careless of my surroundings. I wore the same clothes day after day, I stopped washing or shaving and I ate only the simplest and most convenient food. I slept late every morning, and for many of the days I was plagued by headaches and a general stiffness in my body. I felt ill and looked ill, although I was sure there was nothing physically wrong with me.

It was by now the beginning of May, and spring was advancing. Since I had moved into the cottage the weather had been mostly grey, with occasional days of light rain. Now, suddenly, the weather improved: the blossom was late in the orchard, the flowers began to open. I saw bees, hoverflies, a wasp or two, In the evenings, clouds of gnats hung around the doorways and under the trees. I became aware of the sounds of birds, especially in the mornings. For the first time in my life I was sensitive to the mysterious organisms of nature; a lifetime in city apartments, or uncaring childhood visits to the countryside, had ill prepared me for the commonplaces of nature.

Something stirred inside me, and I felt restless to be free of my introspection. Yet it continued, a counterpoint to the other gladness.

In an attempt to purge both the restlessness and the depression, I made a serious attempt to start work. I hardly knew how I should begin. In the garden, for instance, it seemed that no sooner had I weeded one patch than what I had done a few days before became just as overgrown and untidy. In the house, the work of redecoration was one that had apparently endless ramifications. It would be a long time before I could start painting, because there were so many preliminary repairs to make.

It helped me to imagine the results. If I could summon an image of the garden, pruned, tidied, blooming, then it gave me an incentive to start. To visualize the rooms newly painted, made clean and tidy, was in a sense half the work already done. This was a discovery, a step forward.

In the house, I concentrated on the downstairs room where I had been sleeping. This was a long, large room, running the depth of the house. At one end, a small window looked out towards the garden, hedge and lane at the front; at the other end, a much wider window gave a view of the back garden.

I worked hard, encouraging myself with my imaginative vision of how the room would be by the time I finished. I washed the walls and ceiling, repaired the crumbling plaster, scrubbed down the woodwork, and then applied two coats of the white emulsion Edwin and Marge had brought. When the woodwork was painted, the room was transformed. From a dingy, temporary hovel it had become a light, airy room in which one could live in style. I cleaned up the paint-splashes thoroughly, stained the floorboards and polished the windows.

On an impulse I went into Weohley and bought a large quantity of rush matting, which I spread across the floor.

What most excited me was the discovery that what I had imagined for the room had come to be. The conception of it had influenced its execution.

I sometimes stood or sat in that room for hours on end, relishing the cool tranquillity of it. With both windows opened a warm draught passed through, and at night the honeysuckle that grew beneath the window at the front released a fragrance that until then I had only been able to imagine from chemical imitations.

I thought of it as my white room, and it became central to nw life in the cottage.

With the room completed I returned to my introspective mood, but because I had had something to do for the last few days, I now found that my thoughts were more in focus. As I pottered about the garden, as I started the decoration of the other rooms, I contemplated what I was doing with my life, and what I had done with it in the past.

I perceived my past life as an unordered, uncontrolled bedlam of events.

Nothing made sense, nothing was consistent with anything else. It seemed to me important that I should try to impose some kind of order on my memories. It never occurred to me to question why I should do this. It was just extremely important.

One day I looked in the bloom-spotted mirror in the kitchen and saw the familiar face staring hack at me, but I could not identify it with anything I knew of myself. All I knew was that this sallow, unshaven face with dull eyes was myself, a product of nearly twenty-nine years of life, and it all seemed pointless.

I entered a period of self-questioning: how had I reached this state, this place, this attitude of mind? Was it just an accumulation of bad luck, as the ready excuse seemed to be, or was it the product of a deeper inadequacy? I began to brood.

At first, it was the actual chronology of memory that interested me.

I knew the order of my life, the sequence in which large or important events had taken place, because I had had the universal experience of growing up. Details, however, eluded me. Fragments of my past life--places I had visited, friends I had known, things I had accomplished--were all there in the chaos of my memories, but their precise place in the order of things had to be worked at.

I aimed initially at total recall, taking, for example, my first year at grammar school, and from that starting point trying to attach the many surrounding details: what I had been taught that year, my teachers' names, the names of other children in the school, where I had been living, where my father had been working, what books I might have read or films seen, friendships made or enmities formed.

I muttered to myself as I worked at the decorating, telling myself this inconsequential, rambling and incoherent narrative, as muddled then as the life itself must have been.

Then form became more important. It was not enough merely to establish the _order_ in which my life had progressed, but the relative significance of each event. I was the product of those events, that learning, and I had lost touch with who I was. I needed to rediscover them, perhaps relearn what I had lost.

I had become unfocused and diffuse. I could only regain my sense of identity through my memories.

It grew impossible to retain what I was discovering. I became confused by having to concentrate on remembering, then retaining it. I would clarify a particular period of my life, or so I thought, but then in moving on to another year or another place I would find that either there were distracting similarities, or I had made a mistake the first time.

At last I realized I should have to write it all down. The previous Christmas Felicity had given me a small portable typewriter, and one evening I retrieved it from my heap of possessions. I set up a table in the centre of my white room. I started work immediately, and almost at once I was discovering mysteries about myself.

3

I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need, and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I _became_ what I wrote.

It was not something I could understand. I felt it on an instinctive or emotional level.

It was a process that was exactly like the creation of my white room.

That had been first of all an idea, and later I made the idea real by painting the room as I imagined it. I discovered myself in the same way, but through the written word.

I began writing with no suspicion of the difficulties involved. I had the enthusiasm of a child given coloured pencils for the first time. I was undirected, uncontrolled and entirely lacking in selfconsciousness. All these were to change later, but on that first evening I worked with innocent energy, letting an undisciplined flow of words spread across the paper. I was deeply, mysteriously excited by what I was doing, and frequently read back over what I had written, scribbling corrections on the pages and noting second thoughts in the margins. I felt a sense of vague discontent, but this I ignored: the overwhelming sensation was one of release and satisfaction. To write myself into existence!

I worked late, and when eventually I crawled into my sleeping-bag, I slept badly. The next morning I returned to the work, letting the decoration stay unfinished. Still my creative energy was undiminished, and page after page slipped through the carriage of the typewriter as if there was nothing that could ever obstruct the flow. As I finished with them I scattered the sheets on the floor around the table, imposing a temporary chaos on the order I was creating.

Inexplicably, I came to a sudden halt.

It was the fourth day, when I had upwards of sixty sheets of completed draft around me. I knew each page intimately, so impassioned was my need to write, so frequently had I re-read my work. What lay unwritten ahead had the same quality, the same need to be produced. I had no doubts as to what would follow, what would be unsaid. Yet I stopped halfway down a page, unable to continue.

It was as if I had exhausted my way of writing. I became acutely self-conscious and started to question what I had done, what I was going to do next. I glanced at a page at random, and all at once it seemed naïve, self-obsessed, trite and uninteresting. I noticed that the sentences were largely unpunctuated, that my spelling was erratic, that I used the same words over and over, and even the judgements and observations, on which I had so prided myself, seemed obvious and irrelevant.

Everything about my hasty typescript was unsatisfactory, and I was stricken by a sense of despair and inadequacy.

I temporarily abandoned my writing, and sought an outlet for my energies in the mundane tasks of domesticity. I completed painting one of the upstairs rooms, and moved my mattress and belongings in there. I decided that from this day my white room would he used solely for writing. A plumber arrived, hired by Edwin, and he started to fix the noisy pipes, and instal an immersion heater. I took the interruption as a chance to rethink what I was doing, and to plan more carefully.

So far, everything I had written relied entirely on memory. Ideally, I should have talked to Felicity, to see what she remembered, perhaps to fill in some of the minor mysteries of childhood. But Felicity and I no longer had much in common; we had argued many times in recent years, most recently, and most bitterly, after our father's death. She would have little sympathy for what I was doing. Anyway, it was _my_ story; I did not want it coloured by her interpretation of events.

Instead, I telephoned her one day and asked her to send me the family photograph albums. She had taken in most of my father's possessions, including these, but as far as I knew she had no use for them. Felicity was undoubtedly puzzled by my sudden interest in this material--after the funeral she had offered the albums to me, and I had said no--but she promised to mail them to me.

The plumber left, and I returned to the typewriter.

This time, after the pause, I approached the work with greater care and a desire to be more organized. I was learning to question my subject matter.

Memory is a flawed medium, and the memories of childhood are frequently distorted by influences that cannot be understood at the time. Children lack a world perspective; their horizons are narrow. Their interests are egocentric.

Much of what they experience is interpreted for them by parents. They are unselective in what they see.

In addition, my first attempt had been not much more than a series of connected fragments. Now I sought to tell a story, and to tell it in such a way that there would be an overall shape, a scheme to the telling of it.

Almost at once I discovered the essence of what I wanted to write.

My subject matter was still inevitably myself: my life, my experiences, my hopes, my disappointments and my loves. Where I had gone wrong before, I reasoned, was in setting out this life chronologically. I had started with my earliest memories and attempted to grow on paper as I had grown in life. Now I saw I had to be more devious.

To deal with myself I had to treat myself with greater objectivity, to examine myself in the way the protagonist is examined in a novel. A described life is not the same as a real one. Living is not an art, but to write of life is. Life is a series of accidents and anticlimaxes, misremembered and misunderstood, with lessons only dimly learned.

Life is disorganized, lacks shape, lacks story.

Throughout childhood, mysteries occur in the world around you. They are mysteries only because they are not properly explained, or because of a lack of experience, but they remain in the memory simply because they are so intriguing. In adulthood, explanations often present themselves, but by then they are far too late: they lack the imaginative appeal of a mystery.

Which, though, is the more true: the memory or the fact?

In the third chapter of my second version I began to write of something that illustrated this perfectly. It concerned Uncle William, my father's older brother.

For most of my childhood I never saw William . . . or Billy, as my father called him. There had always been something of a cloud to his name: my mother clearly disapproved of him, yet to my father he was something of a hero. I remember that from quite early on my father would tell me stories of the scrapes he and Billy had been in as children. Billy was always getting into trouble, and had a genius for practical jokes. My father grew up to become a respectable and successful engineer, but Billy had entered into a number of disreputable enterprises, such as working on ships, selling second-hand cars and trading in governmentsurplus goods. I saw nothing wrong with this at all, but for some reason it was considered dubious by my mother.

One day, Uncle William turned up at our house, and at once my life was vested with excitement. Billy was tall and sunburnt, had a big curly moustache and drove an open-top car with an oldfashioned horn. He spoke with a lazy, exciting drawl, and he picked me up and carried me around the garden upside-down and screeching. His big hands had dark calluses on them, and he smoked a dirty pipe. His eyes saw distance. Later, he took me for a breathtaking drive in his car, whizzing through country lanes at great speed, and honking his horn at a policeman on a bicycle. He bought me a toy machine gun, one which could fire wooden bullets right across the room, and showed me how to build a den in a tree.

Then he was gone, as suddenly as he arrived, and I was sent to bed. I lay in my room, listening to my parents arguing together. I could not hear what they were saying, but my father was shouting and a door slammed. Then my mother started crying.

I never saw Uncle William again, and neither of my parents mentioned him. Once or twice I asked about him, but the subject was changed with the sort of parental adroitness children can never overcome. About a year later my father told me that Billy was now working abroad ("somewhere in the East"), and that I was unlikely to see him again. There was something about the way my father said this that made me doubt him, but I was not a subtle child and infinitely preferred to believe what I was told. For a long time after that, Billy's adventures abroad were a familiar imaginative companion: with a little help from the comics I read, I saw him mountain-climbing and game-hunting and building railroads. It was all in keeping with what I knew of him.

When I grew up, and was thinking for myself, I knew that what I had been told was probably untrue, that Billy's disappearance was almost certainly explicable to the real world, but even so the glamorous image of him remained.

It was only after my father died, and I was having to go through his papers, that I came across the truth. I found a letter from the Governor of Durham Prison, saying that Uncle William had been admitted to the hospital wing; a second letter, dated a few weeks later, reported that he had died. I made some inquiries through the Home Office, and discovered that William had been serving a twelve-year sentence for armed robbery. The crime for which he had been convicted was committed within a few days of that crazy, thrilling afternoon in summer.

Even as I wrote about him, though, there was still a powerful part of my imagination that had Uncle Billy away in some exotic place, grappling with man-eaters or skiing down mountain-sides.

Both versions of him were true, but in different qualities of truth. One was sordid, disagreeable and final. The other had imaginative plausibility, in my personal terms, and furthermore had the distinctly attractive bonus that it allowed for Billy to return one day.

To discuss matters like this in my writing I had to be at a stage removed from myself. There was a duplication of myself involved, perhaps even a triplication.

There was I who was writing. There was I whom I could remember. And there was I of whom I wrote, the protagonist of the story.

The difference between factual truth and imaginative truth was constantly on my mind.

Memory was still fundamental, and I had daily reminders of its fallibility. I learnt, for instance, that memory itself did not present a narrative. Important events were remembered in a sequence ordered by the subconscious, and it was a constant effort to reassemble them into my story.

I broke my arm when I was a small child, and there were photographs to remind me in the albums Felicity had sent. But was this accident before or after I started school, before or after the death of my maternal grandmother?

All three events had had a profound effect on me at the time, all three had been early lessons in the unfriendly, random nature of the world. As I wrote, I tried to recall the order in which they had occurred, but this was not possible; memory failed me. I was forced to reinvent the incidents, working them into a continuous but false order so that I could convey why they had influenced me.

Even aids to memory were unreliable, and my broken arm was a surprising example of this.

It was my left arm that was fractured. This I know beyond doubt, as one does not misremember such things, and to this day I am slightly weaker in that arm than in the other. Such memory must he beyond question. And yet, the only objective record of the injury was in a short sequence of black-and-white photographs taken during a family holiday. There, in several pictures taken in sunlit countryside, was a mournful-looking infant whom I recognized as myself, his right arm carried in a white sling.

I came across these photographs at about the same time as I was writing about the incident, and the discovery came as something of a shock. For a few moments I was confused and confounded by the revelation, as it seemed to be, and I was forced to question every other assumption I had been making about memories. Of course, I soon realized what must have happened: the processor had apparently printed the entire spool of film from the wrong side of the negative. As soon as I examined the prints more closely--at first, all I had looked at was myself--I saw a number of background details which confirmed this: car registration numbers printed in reverse, traffic driving on the right, clothes buttoned the wrong way round, and so on.

It was all perfectly explicable, but it taught me two more things about myself: that I was becoming obsessed with checking and authenticating what hitherto I had taken for granted, and that I could rely on nothing from the past.

I came to a second pause in my work. Although I was satisfied with my new way of working, each new discovery was a setback. I was becoming aware of the deceptiveness of prose. Every sentence contained a lie.

I began a process of revision, going back through my completed pages and rewriting certain passages numerous times. Each successive version subtly improved on life. Every time I rewrote a _part_ of the truth I came nearer to a whole truth.

When I was at last able to continue where I had left off, I soon came across a new difficulty.

As my story progressed from childhood to adolescence, then to young adulthood, other people entered the narrative. These were not family, but outsiders, people who came into my life and who, in some cases, were still a part of it. In particular, there was a group of friends I had known since university, and a number of women with whom I had had affairs. One of these, a girl named Alice, was someone I had been engaged to for several months. We had seriously intended to marry, but in the end it went wrong and we parted. Alice was now married to someone else, had two children, but was still a good and trusted friend. Then there was Gracia, whose effect on my life in recent years had been profound.

If I was to serve my obsessive need for truth then I had to deal with these relationships in some way. Every new friendship marked a moving on from the immediate past, and every lover had changed my outlook for better or worse in some way. Even though there was very little chance anyone mentioned in my manuscript would ever read it, I nevertheless felt inhibited by the fact that I still knew them.

Some of what I intended to say would he unpalatable, and I wanted to he free to describe my sexual experiences in detail, if not in intimate detail.

The simplest method would have been to change names, and fudge around the details of time and place in an attempt to make the people unrecognizable.

But this was not the sort of truth I was seeking to tell. Nor could it be done by simply leaving them out; these experiences had been important to me.

I discovered the solution at last by use of indirection. I invented new friends and lovers, giving them fictitious backgrounds and identities. One or two of them I brought forward from childhood, so to speak, implying that they had been lifelong friends, whereas in my real life I had lost contact with the other children I had grown up with. It made the narrative more of a piece, with a greater consistency in the story. Everything seemed to have coherence and significance.

Virtually nothing was wasted; every described event or character had some form of correlative elsewhere in the story.

So I worked, learning about myself as I went. Truth was being served at the expense of literal fact, but it was a higher, _better_ form of truth.

As my manuscript proceeded I entered a state of mental excitation. I was sleeping only five or six hours a night, and when I woke up I always went directly to my desk to re-read what I had written the day before. I subordinated everything to the writing. I ate only when I absolutely had to, I slept only when I was exhausted. Everything else was neglected; Edwin and Marge's redecoration was postponed indefinitely.

Outside, the long summer was tirelessly hot. The garden was overgrown, but now the soil was parched and cracked, and the grass was yellow. Trees were dying, and the stream at the end of the garden dried up. On the few occasions I went into Weobley I overheard conversations about the weather. The heatwave had become a drought; livestock was being slaughtered, water was being rationed.

Day after day I sat in my white room, feeling the warm draught from the windows. I worked shirtless and unshaven, cool and comfortable in my squalor.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I came to the end of my story. It ceased abruptly, with no more events to describe.

I could hardly believe it. I had anticipated the experience of finishing as being a sudden release, a new awareness of myself, an end to a quest. But the narrative merely came to a halt, with no conclusions, no revelations.

I was disappointed and disturbed, feeling that all my work had been to no avail. I sifted through the pages, wondering where I had gone wrong.

Everything in the narrative proceeded towards a conclusion, but it ended where I had no more to say. I was in my life in Kilburn, before I split with Gracia, before my father died, before I lost my job. I could take it no further, because there was only here, Edwin's house. Where was the end?

It occurred to me that the only ending that would be right would be a false one. In other words, because I had reassembled my memories to make a story, then the story's conclusion must also be imaginary.

But to do that I should first have to acknowledge that I really had become two people: myself, and the protagonist of the story.

At this point, conscience struck me about the neglect in the house. I was disillusioned by my writing, and by my inability to cope with it, and I took the opportunity to take a break. I spent a few days in the garden, during the last hot days of September, cutting hack the overgrown shrubbery and plucking what fruit I could find still on the trees. I cut the lawn, dug over what remained of the dehydrated vegetable patch.

Afterwards, I painted another of the upstairs rooms.

Because I was away from my failed manuscript, I started to think about it again. I knew I needed to make one last effort to get it right. I had to bring shape to it, but to do so I had to straighten out my daily life.

The key to a purposeful life, I decided, lay in the organization of the day. I created a pattern of domestic habit: an hour a day to cleaning, two hours to Edwin's redecoration and the garden, eight hours for sleep. I would bathe regularly, eat by the clock, shave, wash my clothes, and for everything I did there would be an hour in the day and a day in the week. My need to write was obsessive but it was dominating my life, probably to the detriment of the writing itself.

Now, paradoxically liberated by having constrained myself, I began to write a third version, more smoothly and more effectively than ever before.

I knew at last exactly how my story must be told. If the deeper truth could only be told by falsehood--in other words, through metaphor--then to achieve total truth I must create total falsehood. My manuscript had to become a metaphor for myself.

I created an imaginary place and an imaginary life.

My first two attempts had been muted and claustrophobic. I described myself in terms of inwardness and emotion. External events had a shadowy, almost wraith-like presence beyond the edge of vision. This was because I found the real world imaginatively sterile; it was too anecdotal, too lacking in story. To create an imagined landscape enabled me to shape it to my own needs, to make it stand for certain personal symbols in my life. I had already made a fundamental step away from pure autobiographical narrative; now I took the process one stage further and placed the protagonist, my metaphorical self, in a wide and stimulating landscape.

I invented a city and I called it "Jethra", intending it to stand for a composite of London, where I had been born, and the suburbs of Manchester, where I had spent most of my childhood. J ethra was in a country called

"Faiandland", which was a moderate and slightly old-fashioned place, rich in tradition and culture, proud of its history but having difficulty in a modern and competitive world. I gave Faiandland a geography and laws and constitution. Jethra was its capital and principal port, situated on the southern coast. Later, I sketched in details of some of the other countries which made up this world; I even drew a rough map, but quickly threw it away because it codified the imagination.

As I wrote, this environment became almost as important as the experiences of my protagonist. I discovered, as before, that by invention of details the larger truths emerged.

I soon found my stride. The fictions of my earlier attempts now seemed awkward and contrived, but as soon as I transferred them to this imaginary world they took on plausibility and conviction. Before, I had changed the order of events merely to clarify them, but now I discovered that all this had had a purpose that only my subconscious had understood. The change to an invented background made sense of what I was doing.

Details accumulated. Soon I saw that in the sea to the south of Faiandland there would be islands, a vast archipelago of small, independent countries. For the people of Jethra, and for my protagonist in particular, these islands represented a form of wish, or of escape. To travel in these islands was to achieve some kind of purpose. At first I was not sure what this would be, but as I wrote I began to understand.

Against this background, the story I wanted to tell of my life emerged.

My protagonist had my own name, but all the people I had known were given false identities. My sister Felicity became "Kalia", Gracia became "Seri", my parents were concealed.

Because it was all strange to me I responded imaginatively to what I was writing, but because everything was in another sense totally familiar to me, the world of the other Peter Sinclair became one which I could recognize, and inhabit mentally.

I worked hard and regularly, and the pages of the new manuscript began to pile up. Every evening I would finish work at the time I had predetermined on my daily chart, and then I would go over the finished pages, making minor corrections to the text. Sometimes I would sit on my chair in my white room, with the manuscript on my lap, and I would feel the weight of it and know that I was holding in my hands everything about me that was worth telling or that could be told.

It was a separate identity, an identical self, yet it was outside me and was fixed. It would not age as I would age, nor could it ever be destroyed. It had a life beyond the paper on which it was typewritten; if I burned it, or someone took it away from me, it would still exist on some higher plane. Pure truth had an unageing quality; it would outlive me.

This final version could not have been more different from those first tentative pages I had written a few months before. It was a mature, outward account of a life, truthfully told. Everything about it was invention, apart from the use of my own name, yet everything it contained, every word and sentence, was as true in the high sense of the word as truth could attain.

This I knew beyond doubt or question.

I had found myself, explained myself, and in a very personal sense of the word I had _defined_ myself.

At last I could feel the end of my story approaching. It was no longer a problem. As I worked I had felt it take shape in my mind, as earlier the story itself had taken form. It was merely a question of setting it down, of typing the pages. I only sensed what the ending would be; I would not know the actual words until the moment came to write them. With that would come my release, my fulfilment, my rehabilitation into the world.

But then, when I had less than ten pages to go, everything was disrupted beyond any hope of retrieval.

4

The drought had at last broken, and it had been raining continuously for the past week. The lane leading to the house was an almost impassable morass of deep puddles and squelching mud. I heard the car before I saw it: the revving engine and the tyres sucking out of the sticky mud. I hunched over the typewriter, dreading an interruption, and I stared down at the last words I had written, holding them there with my eyes lest they should slip.

The car halted outside the house, beyond the hedge and just out of sight. I could hear the engine running slowly and the wiper-blades thwacking to and fro across the windscreen. Then the engine was turned off, and a car door slammed.

"Hello? Peter, are you there?" The voice came from outside, and I recognized it as Felicity's.

I continued to stare at my unfinished page, hoping that by silence I could fend her off. I was so nearly finished. I wanted to see no one.

"Peter, let me in! It's pouring with rain!"

She came to the window and tapped on the glass. I turned to look at her because she had dimmed the daylight.

"Open the door. I'm getting soaked through."

"What do you want?" I said, staring at my unfinished page and seeing the words recede.

"I've come to see you. You haven't answered my letters. Look, don't just sit there. I'm getting wet!"

"There's no lock," I said, and waved my hand in the general direction of the front door.

In a moment I heard the handle turn and the door scraped open. I knelt on the floor, scooping up my neatly typed pages, sorting them into a pile. I did not want Felicity to read what I had written, I wanted no one to see it. I seized the last page from the typewriter, and placed it at the bottom of the pile. I was trying to sort the pages into my carefully devised sequence when Felicity came into the room.

"There's a heap of mail out there," she said. "No wonder you haven't replied. Don't you ever look at your post?"

"I've been busy," I said. I was checking through the numbered pages, fearing that some might have gone out of order. I was wishing I had taken a carbon copy of my work, and kept it in some secret place.

Felicity had come right into the room, and was standing over me.

"I had to come, Peter. You sounded so strange on the phone, and James and I both felt something must be wrong. When you didn't answer the letters, I telephoned Edwin. What are you doing?"

"Leave me alone," I said. "I'm busy. I don't want you interrupting me."

I had numbered each page carefully, but 72 was missing. I searched around for it, and some of the others slipped to the side.

"God, this place is a mess!"

For the first time I looked straight at her. I felt an odd sensation of recognizing her, as if she were somebody I had created. I remembered her from the manuscript: she was there and her name was Kalia. My sister Kalia, two years older than me, married to a man named Yallow.

"Felicity, what do you want?"

"I was worried about you. And I was right to be worried. Look at the state of this room! Do you ever clean it?"

I stood up, holding my manuscript pages. Felicity turned away to go into the kitchen. I was trying to think of somewhere I could hide the manuscript until Felicity left. She had seen it but she could have no idea of what I had been writing, nor how important it was.

There was a clattering of metal and crockery, and I heard a gasp from Felicity. I went to the kitchen door and watched what she was doing. She was standing by the sink, moving the plates and pans to one side.

"Have Edwin and Marge seen the mess you're making of their house?" she said. "You never could look after yourself, but this is the limit. The whole place stinks!"

She forced open the window and the room filled with the sound of rain.

"Would you like a cup of coffee?" I said, but Felicity just glared at me.

She rinsed her hands under the tap and looked around for a towel. In the end she wiped her hands on her coat; I had lost my towel somewhere. Felicity and James lived in a modern detached house in what had once been a field outside Sheffield. Now it was an estate, with thirty_six identical houses placed in a neat circular avenue. I had been to the house a few times, once with Gracia, and there was a whole chapter of my manuscript describing the weekend I spent there after they had their first child. I had an impulse to show Felicity the relevant pages, but then I thought she might not appreciate them.

I held the manuscript tight against my chest.

"Peter, what's been happening to you? Your clothes are filthy, the house is a tip, you look as if you haven't eaten a proper meal in weeks. And your fingers!"

"What's wrong with them?"

"You never used to bite your nails."

I turned away. "Leave me alone, Felicity. I'm working hard and I want to finish what I'm doing."

"I'm not going to leave you alone! I had to sort out all Father's business, I had to sell the house, I had to wet-nurse you all through all that legal business you wanted to know nothing about . . . and run my own home and look after my family. You did nothing! And what about Gracia?"

"What about her?"

"I've had her to worry about too."

"Gracia? How have you seen her?"

"She got in touch with me when you left her. She wanted to know where you were."

"But I wrote to her. She didn't answer."

Felicity said nothing, but there was anger in her eyes.

"How is Gracia?" I said. "Where is she living?"

"You selfish bastard! You know she nearly died!"

"No she didn't."

"She overdosed herself. You must have known!"

"Oh yes," I said. "Her flatmate told me."

I remembered then: the girl's pale lips, her shaking hands, telling me to go, not to bother Gracia.

"You know Gracia's got no family. I had to take a week in London, because of you."

"You should have told me. I was looking for her."

"Peter, don't lie to yourself! You know you ran away."

I was thinking about my manuscript, and suddenly I recalled what had happened to page 72. When I was numbering the pages one evening I had made a mistake. I had been meaning to renumber the other pages ever since. I felt relieved that the page was not lost.

"Are you listening to me?"

"Yes, of course."

Felicity pushed past me aild returned to my white room. Here she opened both windows, admitting a cold draught, then went noisily up the wooden stairs. I followed her, feeling a stir of alarm.

"I thought you were supposed to be decorating the place," Felicity said.

"You've done nothing. Edwin will be furious. He thinks you've nearly finished."

"I don't care," I said. I went to the door of the room I had been sleeping in, and closed it. I did not want her to look inside because my magazines were all over the place. I leant against the door to stop her entering. "Go away, Felicity. Go away, go away."

"My God, what have you been doing?" She had opened the door of the lavatory, but immediately closed it again.

"It's blocked," I said. "I've been meaning to clear it."

"You're living like an animal."

"It doesn't matter. No one's here."

"Let me see the other rooms."

Felicity advanced on me and tried to grab my manuscript. I clutched it tighter against me, but she had been feinting. She seized the door handle and had the door open before I could stop her.

She stared past me into the room for several seconds. Then she looked at me with contempt.

"Open the window," she said. "It stinks in there." She walked across the landing to inspect the other rooms.

I went into my bedroom to clear up what she had seen. I closed the magazines and shoved them guiltily beneath my sleeping-bag, and kicked my soiled clothes into a heap in one corner.

Downstairs, Felicity was in my white room, standing by my desk and looking down at it. As I walked in she glanced in a pointed way at my manuscript.

"Can I see those papers, please?"

I shook my head, and clutched them to me.

"All right. You don't have to hold them like that."

"I can't show them to you, Felicity. I just want you to go away. Leave me alone."

"O.K., just hold on." She pulled the chair away from the desk, and placed it in the middle of the floor. The room looked suddenly lopsided. "Sit down, Peter. I've got to think."

"I don't know what you're doing here. I'm all right. I'm fine. I need to be alone. I'm working."

But Felicity was no longer listening. She went through into the kitchen and ran some water into the kettle. I sat on the chair and held the manuscript against my chest. I watched her through the door to the kitchen as she held two cups under the tap, and looked around for where I kept the tea. She found my instant coffee instead, and spooned some of it into each cup. While the kettle sat on the gas she started clearing my unwashed pots and pans to one side and filled the sink with water, holding her fingers in the flow.

"Is there no hot water?"

"Yes . . . it's hot." I could see the steam cascading around her arms.

Felicity turned off the tap. "Edwin said an immersion heater had been installed. Where is it?"

I shrugged. Felicity found the switch and clicked it on. Then she stood by the sink, her head bowed. She seemed to he shivering.

I had never seen Felicity like this before; it was the first time we had been alone together in years. Perhaps the last time was when we had been living at home, during one of my vacs from university, when she was engaged.

Since then James had always been with her, or James and the children. It gave me a new insight into her, and I recalled the difficulty with which I had written of Kalia in my manuscript. The scenes of childhood with her had been amongst the most difficult of all, and those for which the greatest amount of background invention had been necessary.

I watched Felicity as she stood there in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and I silently urged her to leave. Her interruption made my need to write even greater than before. Perhaps this had been her unintended role in coming to the house: to disturb me to help me. I wanted her to leave so I could finish what I was doing. I even saw the possibility of yet another draft, one driven deeper into the realms of invention in my quest for a higher truth.

Felicity was staring through the window towards the garden, and some of the tension in the room had faded. I put the manuscript on the floor by my feet.

Felicity said: "Peter, I think you need help. Will you come and stay with James and me?"

"I can't. I've got to work, I haven't finished what I'm doing."

"What _are_ you doing?" She was looking at me now, leaning back against the window sill.

I tried to think of an answer. I could not tell her everything. "I'm telling the truth about myself."

Something moved in her eyes, and with a precognitive insight I sensed what she was going to say.

Chapter Four in my manuscript: my sister Kalia, two years older than me.

We were close enough in age to be treated as a twosome by our parents, but far enough apart for real differences between us to be felt. She was always that little hit ahead of me, in school, in staying up late, in going to parties.

Yet I caught her up because I was clever at school while she was just pretty, and she never forgave me. As we went through our teens, as we became people, a dividing rift became apparent. Neither of us tried to bridge it, but took up positions within striking distance of each other, the ground falling away between us. Her attitude was usually an assumed knowingness about what I was doing or thinking. Everything was said to be inevitable, nothing I could do would ever surprise her, because either I was completely predictable in her terms or else she had been there before me. I grew up loathing Kalia's knowing smile and experienced laugh, as she tried to place me forever two years behind. And as I told Felicity what I had been writing in my manuscript, I anticipated the same smile, the same dismissive click of the tongue.

I was wrong. Felicity merely nodded and looked away.

"I've got to get you out of this place," she said. "Is there nowhere you can go in London?"

"I'm all right, Felicity. Don't worry about me."

"And what about Gracia?"

"What about her?"

Felicity looked exasperated. "I can't interfere any more. You ought to see her. She needs you, and she's got no one else."

"But she left me."

Chapter Seven in my manuscript, and several chapters that followed: Gracia was Seri, a girl on an island. I had met Gracia on the Greek island of Kos one summer. I had gone to Greece in an attempt to understand why it represented an obscure threat in my life. Greece seemed to me the place other people went to, and fell in love. It was somewhere that was like a sexual rival. Friends returned from package-tour holidays and they had become enraptured, their dreams charged with the thrall of Greece. So I went at last to confront this rival, and there I met Gracia. We travelled around the Aegean islands for a time, sleeping together, then returned to London, where we lost touch with each other. A few months later we met again by chance, as one does in London. We were both haunted by the islands, the pervasive distant rapture.

In London we fell in love, and slowly the islands faded. We became ordinary.

Now she had become Seri and would be alone in Jethra at the end of the manuscript. Jethra was London, the islands were behind us, but Gracia had overdosed on sleeping tablets and we had split up. It was all in the manuscript, translated to its higher truth. I was tired.

The kettle boiled and Felicity went to make the coffee. There was no sugar, no milk, and nowhere for her to sit. I moved the manuscript pages to the side and gave her the chair. She said nothing for a few minutes, holding the cup of black coffee in her hands and sipping at it.

"I can't keep driving down to see you," she said.

"I'm not asking you to. I can look after myself."

"With blocked-up plumbing, no food, all this filth?"

"I don't want the same things as you." She said nothing, but glanced around at my white room. "What are you going to tell Edwin and Marge?" I said.

"Nothing."

"I don't want them here either."

"It's their house, Peter."

"I'll clean it up. I'm doing it all the time."

"You haven't touched the place since you've been here, I'm surprised you haven't caught diphtheria or something, in this mess. What was it like in the hot weather? The place must have stunk to high heaven."

"I didn't notice. I've been working."

"So you say. Look, where were you ringing me from? Is there a call-box?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"I'm going to telephone James. I want him to know what's going on here."

"_Nothing's_ going on here! I just need to be left alone long enough to finish what I'm doing."

"And then you'll clean up and paint the house and clear the garden?"

"I've been doing bits of it all summer."

"You haven't, Peter, you know you haven't. It hasn't been touched. Edwin told me what you agreed with him. He was trusting you to get the place cleaned up for them, and it's worse now than it was before you moved in."

"What about this room?" I said.

"This is the worst slum in the place!"

I was shocked. My white room was the focus of my life in the house.

Because it had become what I imagined, it was central to everything I was doing. The sun dazzled against the newly painted walls, the rush matting was pleasantly abrasive against my naked feet, and every morning when I came down from sleeping I could smell the freshness of paint. I always felt renewed and recharged by my white room, because it was a haven of sanity in a life become muddled. Felicity threw this in doubt. If I looked at the room in the way she obviously did . . . yes, I had not yet actually got around to painting it. The boards were bare, the plaster was cracked and bulging with fungus, and mildew clung around the window frames.

But this was Felicity's failure, not mine. She was perceiving it wrongly. I had learnt how to write my manuscript by observing my white room.

Felicity saw only narrow or actual truth. She was unreceptive to higher truth, to imaginative coherence, and she would certainly fail to understand the kinds of truth I told in my manuscript.

"Where's the call-box, Peter? Is it in the village?"

"Yes. What are you going to say to James?"

"I just want to tell him I got here safely. He's looking after the children this weekend, in case you were wondering."

"Is it a weekend?"

"Today's Saturday. Do you mean you don't know?"

"I hadn't thought about it."

Felicity finished her coffee and took the cup to the kitchen. She collected her handbag, then went through my white room towards the front door.

I heard her open it, but then she came back.

"I'll get some lunch. What would you like?"

"Anything at all."

Then she was gone, and at once I picked up my manuscript. I found the page I had been working on when Felicity arrived; I had written only two and a half lines, and the white space beneath seemed recriminatory of me. I read the lines but they made no sense to me. The longer I worked I had found that my typingspeed increased to the point where I could write almost as fast as I could think. My style was therefore loose and spontaneous, depending for its development on the whim of the moment. In the time Felicity had been at the house I had lost my train of thought.

I read back over the two or three pages before my enforced abandonment of it, and at once I felt more confident. Writing something was rather like the cutting of a groove on a gramophone record: my thoughts were placed on the page, and to read back over them was like playing the record to hear my thoughts. After a few paragraphs I discovered the momentum of my ideas.

Felicity and her intrusion were forgotten. It was like finding my real self again. Once I was submerged in my work it was as if I became whole again.

Felicity had made me feel mad, irrational, unstable.

I put the unfinished page to one side and inserted a clean sheet in the typewriter. I quickly copy_typed the two and a half lines, and I was poised ready to continue.

But I stopped, and it was in the same place as before: "For a moment I thought I knew where I was, but when I looked back--"

When I looked back at what?

I read back over the preceding page, trying to hear the recording of my thoughts. The scene was the build-up to my climactic row with Gracia, but through Seri and Jethra it had become distanced. The layers of my realities momentarily confused me. In the manuscript it was not an argument at all, more an impasse between the way two people interpreted the world. What had I been trying to say?

I thought back to the real row. We were in Marylebone Road, on the corner with Baker Street. It was raining. The argument blew up from nowhere, ostensibly some trivial disagreement about whether to see a film or spend the evening at my flat, but in reality the tensions had been there for days. I was cold and feeling angry, and disproportionately conscious of the cars and lorries accelerating away from the lights, their tyres noisy on the wet road.

The pub by Baker Street Station had just opened, but to get there meant we had to cross the road by the pedestrian underpass. Gracia was a claustrophobe; it was raining; we started shouting. I left her there and never saw her again.

How had I been intending to deal with this? I would have known that before Felicity arrived; everything about the text spoke of an anticipated continuity.

Felicity's arrival had been doubly intrusive. Apart from interrupting me, she had imposed different ideas about perceived truth.

For instance, she had brought new information about Gracia. I knew that Gracia had taken an overdose after our row, but it had not been important.

Once before in our relationship, Gracia had taken a small overdose after an argument; even she had said later that it was a way of drawing attention to herself. Then during that chilling doorstep argument with her flatmate, the importance of it had been diminished by the girl. Through her dislike of me, through her evident contempt, the bitter information had been passed, but minimized somehow; it was not for me to worry about it. I took it at face value. Perhaps even then Gracia had been in hospital. Felicity told me she had nearly died.

But the truth, the higher truth, was that I had evaded it. I had not wanted to know. Felicity made me know. Gracia had made what was probably a serious attempt on her life.

I could, in my manuscript, describe a Gracia who drew attention to herself; I did not know a Gracia who would make a serious effort to kill herself.

Because Felicity had revealed a side of Gracia's character I had never detected before, did it also mean that there were other parts of my life where I made similar failures of judgement? How much truth was I capable of telling?

Then there was the source, Felicity herself. In my life she was not an impartial figure. It was part of her tactic to me, as it always had been, to present herself as maturer, wiser, more sensible, more practised in life. From the time we had played together as children she had always sought dominance over me, whether it was the temporary advantage of being slightly bigger than me, or the knowingness, assumed or otherwise, of being in adulthood that little bit more experienced. Felicity arrogated to herself a normality that was deemed superior to mine. While I remained unmarried and lived in rented rooms, she had a family, a house, a bourgeois respectability. Her way of life was not mine, yet she assumed I aspired to it, and because I had not yet achieved it she gave herself the right to be critical.

Her manner since her arrival was entirely consistent with her normal attitude to me: a curious mixture of concern and criticism, misunderstanding not only me but what I was trying to do with my life.

It was all there in Chapter Four, and I thought I had at last dealt with it by writing of it. Yet she had done her damage, and the manuscript had been halted a few pages from the end.

She threw into question everything I had tried to do, and there, at the actual interface, the last words I had written, was the evidence. The sentence lay unfinished on the page: ".. . but when I looked back--"

But what? I typed in, "Seri was waiting", then promptly crossed it out.

It was not what I had intended to say, even if, ironically, those actual words were what I had been going to write. The motivating impulse had died with the sentence.

I glanced back through the bulk of the manuscript. It made a satisfactorily heavy pile: well over two hundred pages of typewritten script.

It felt solid in my hand, a proof of my existence.

Now, though, I had to question what I had done. I sought the truth, but Felicity reminded me of its tenuous nature. She could not see my white room.

Suppose someone _disagreed_ with my version of the truth?

Felicity certainly would, even assuming I allowed her to read it. And Gracia too, from what Felicity said, would probably remember a different version of the same events. My parents, were they still around, would probably be shocked by some of the things Iliad said about childhood.

So truth was subjective, but I had never pretended otherwise. The manuscript aspired to he nothing more than an account of my own life, honestly told. I even made no claim for the quality or originality of my life. It was not unusual in any way, except to me. It was all I knew of myself, all I had in the world. No one could disagree with it because events were portrayed in the way I alone had perceived them.

I read the last completed page again, and scanned the two and a half lines once more. I began to seilse what I was about to say. Gracia, in her guise as Seri, was at the street corner because--

The outside door banged, as if a shoulder was being rammed against it. I heard the handle rattle, and sounds from outside poured in. Felicity came into the room, laden with a rain-sodden paper carrier bag which she cradled in her arms.

"I'll cook lunch, but after that you'd better pack. James says it's best if we go back to Sheffield tonight."

I stared at her incredulously, not because of what she said but in amazement at her timing. It beggared belief that she should twice interrupt me at precisely the same place.

I looked down at the retyped page. It was in every way identical to the one it had replaced.

Slowly, I wound it out of the typewriter carriage, and put it in its place at the bottom of the manuscript.

I sat silently while Felicity moved about the kitchen. She had bought an apron in the village. She washed the dirty dishes, put sonic chops on to cook.

When we had eaten I sat quietly at the table, retreating from Felicity with her plans and opinions and concern. Her normality was an infusion of madness into my life.

I would be fed and bathed and brought back to health. It was Father's death that had done it. I had flipped. Not much, according to Felicity, but I had nevertheless flipped. I was not able to care for myself, so she would take over. I would see by her example what I was denying myself. We would make weekend forays to Edwin's cottage, she and I and James, and the children too, and we would bustle about with brooms and paint brushes, and James and I would clear the overgrown garden, and in no time at all we would make the house habitable, and then Edwin and Marge would come and see it. When I was better we would all visit London, she and I and James, but perhaps not the children this time, and we would see Gracia, and the two of us would be left together to do whatever the two of us needed to do. I would not be allowed to flip again. I would visit Sheffield every two or three weeks, and we would go for long walks on the moors, and perhaps I should even travel abroad. I liked Greece, didn't I? James could get me a job in Sheffield, or in London if I really wanted it, and Gracia and I would he happy together and get married and have--

I said: "What are you talking about, Felicity?"

"Were you listening to what I said?"

"Look, it's stopped raining."

"Oh God! You're impossible!"

She was smoking a cigarette. I imagined the smoke drifting about my white room, settling on the new paintwork, yellowing it. It would reach the pages of my manuscript, discolouring those too, setting down a layer of Felicity's influence.

The manuscript was like an unfinished piece of music. The fact of its incompleteness was bigger than its existence. Like a dominant seventh chord it sought resolution, a final tonic harmony.

Felicity started to clear away the plates, clattering them in the kitchen sink, so I picked up my manuscript and headed for the stairs.

"Are you going to pack?"

"I'm not coming with you," I said. "I want to finish what I'm doing."

She appeared from the kitchen, suds of washing-up liquid dripping from her hands.

"Peter, it's all been decided. You're coming back with me."

"I've got work to do."

"What _is_ it you've been writing?"

"I told you once."

"Let me see." Her soapy hand extended, and I clutched the manuscript tightly.

"No one is ever to see this."

Then she reacted the way I had expected before. She clicked her tongue, tilted her head quickly back; whatever it was I had done had not been worth doing.

I sat alone on the shambles of my sleeping-bag, holding the manuscript to me. I was near to tears. Downstairs, Felicity had discovered my empty whisky bottles, and was shouting up at me, accusing me of something.

No one would ever read my manuscript. It was the most private thing in the world, a definition of myself. I had told a story, and had crafted it to make it readable, but my intended audience was myself alone.

At last I went downstairs, to discover that Felicity had lined up my empty bottles in the small hallway at the bottom of the stairs. There were so many I had to step over them to get into my white room. Felicity was waiting there.

"Why did you bring in the bottles?" I said.

"You can't leave them in the garden. What have you been trying to do, Peter, drink yourself to death?"

"I've been here for several months."

"We'll have to get someone to take them away. Next time we come here."

"I'm not leaving with you," I said.

"You can have the spare room. The children are out all day, and I'll leave you alone."

"You never have yet. Why should you start now?"

She had already taken some of my stuff and put it in the back of her car. Now she was closing windows, turning off taps, checking the plugs. I watched her mutely, holding the manuscript to my chest. It was spoiled now forever. The words would have to stay unwritten, the thought remain unfinished. I heard imaginary music in my head: the dominant seventh rang out, forever seeking its cadence. It began to fade, like the run-off track on a gramophone record, music replaced by unplanned crackle. Soon the stylus in my mind would settle in the final, central groove, indefinitely stuck but clicking with apparent meaning, thirty-three times a minute. Eventually someone would have to lift the pick-up arm away, and silence would fall.

5

Suddenly the ship came into sunlight, and it was as if I had broken with what lay behind me.

I narrowed my eyes against the brilliant sky, and saw that the cloud was some effect of the land, for it ran in a clearly defined east-west line.

Ahead, all was clear and blue, promising warmth and calm seas. We headed south, as if propelled by the cold wind blustering from astern.

I felt my senses extend, and awareness spread around me like delicate nerve-cells reaching for sensation. I became aware. I opened.

There was a smell of diesel oil, of salt, of fish. The cold wind reached me, even though I was protected by the ship's superstructure; my city clothes felt thin and inadequate. I breathed in deeply, holding the air for several seconds, as if it might contain cleansing agents that would scrub out my system, refresh my mind, rejuvenate and re-inspire me. Beneath my feet, the deck was vibrating with the grind of engines. I felt the pitching movement of the ship in the swell, but my body was balanced and in tune with it.

I went forward to the prow of the ship, and here I turned to look back at what was behind me.

On the ship itself, a few other passengers huddled on the foredeck. Many of them were elderly couples, sitting or standing together, and most of them wore windcheaters or plastic rainproofs. They seemed to look neither forward nor back, but within. I stared past them, and beyond the ship's superstructure and funnel, where silent sea-birds glided effortlessly, to the coast we had left. The ship had turned slightly since leaving the harbour, and much of Jethra was visible. It seemed to spread along the coast, sheltering behind its quayside cranes and warehouses, filling its broad, estuarine valley. I tried to imagine its daily life continuing without me there to see it, as if everything might cease in niy absence. Already, Jethra had become an idea.

Ahead was our first port of call: Seevl, the offshore island I had never visited. It was the island of the Dream Archipelago closest to Jethra, and for all my life had merely been a part of the scenery. Dark, treeless Seevl dominated and blocked the view to the south of Jethra, yet to all but a few people with family connections, Seevl was prohibited to Jethrans. Politically it was part of the Archipelago, and while the war continued neutral territories were inaccessible. Seevl was the first, the nearest; there were ten thousand neutral islands beyond.

I wanted the ship to go faster, because while Jethra lay behind I felt I had not truly started, but the sea at the mouth of the estuary was shallow, and the ship changed course a number of times. We were approaching Stromb Head, the great broken cliffs at the eastern end of Seevl, and once we had rounded this all that lay ahead would be unknown.

I paced the deck, impatient for the journey, cold in the wind and frustrated by my fellow passengers. Before boarding I had imagined that I would be travelling with many people of my own age, but it seemed that almost everyone who was not crew was at retirement age. They appeared to be self-absorbed, heading for their new homes; one of the few methods of legal entry to the islands was by buying a house or apartment on one of a dozen or so listed islands.

At last we rounded the Head and sailed into the bay outside Seevl Town.

Jethra disappeared from view.

I was eager for my first sight of an Archipelagan town, for a glimpse of what other islands might be like, but Seevl Town was a disappointment. Grey stone houses rose in uneven tiers on the hillsides surrounding the harbour, looking untidy and drab. It was easy to imagine the place in winter, with the doors and shutters closed, the rain slicking the roofs and streets, people bent against the sea wind, few lights showing. I wondered if they had electricity on Seevl, or running water, or cars. There was no traffic that I could see in the narrow streets surrounding the harbour, but the roads were paved. Seevl Town was quite similar to some of the remote hill villages in the north of Faiandland. The only obvious difference was that smoke was pouring from most of the chimneys; this was a novelty to me, because there were strict anti-pollution laws in Jethra and the rest of Faiandland.

None of the passengers disembarked at Seevl, and our arrival caused little stir in the town. A few minutes after we had tied up at the end of the quay, two uniformed men walked slowly down and boarded the ship. They were Archipelagan immigration officers, a fact which became clear when all passengers were instructed to assemble on Number One deck. To see the other passengers together gave me the opportunity to confirm that there were very few young people aboard. While we were queuing up to have our visas checked I was thinking that the nine days it would take to reach Muriseav, where I was leaving the ship, might turn out to be lonely. There was a youngish woman in the queue behind me--I guessed her age to be in the early thirties--but she was reading a book and seemed incurious about anyone else.

I had seen my voyage to the Dream Archipelago as a break with the past, a new beginning, but already it seemed as if the first few days, at least, would have to he spent in the same sort of half-hearted isolation I had grown used to in Jethra.

I had been lucky. Everyone I knew said it about me, and I even believed it myself. At first there had been parties, but as we all began to appreciate what had happened to me, I found myself more and more cut off from them. When finally the time had come to leave Jethra, to travel to the Dream Archipelago to collect my prize, I was glad to go. I was eager for travel, for the heat of the tropics, for the sound of different languages and a sight of different customs. Yet now it had started I knew that it would be more enjoyable in company.

I said something to the woman behind me, but she merely replied, smiled politely and returned to her book.

I reached the head of the queue and handed over my passport. I ilad already opened it at the page where the Archipelagan High Commission in Jethra had stamped the visa, but the officer closed it and examined it from the front. The other sat beside him, staring at my face.

The officer looked at my photograph and personal details.

"Robert Peter Sinclair," he said, looking up at me for the first time.

I confirmed this, but was distracted by the fact that his was the first authentic island accent I had ever heard. He pronounced the name I usually used with a lengthened vowel: "Peyter". The only time I had heard the accent before was when actors used it in films; ilearing it used naturally gave me the odd feeling that he was putting on the accent to amuse me.

"Where are you travelling to, Mr Sinclair?"

"Muriseay, at first."

"And where are you going after that?"

"Coliago," I said, and waited for his reaction.

He gave no obvious sign that he had heard. "May I see your ticket, Mr Sinclair?"

I reached into an inner pocket and produced the sheaf of flimsy dockets issued by the shipping company, but he waved them away.

"Not those. The lottery ticket."

"Of course," I said, feeling enlbarrassed that I had misunderstood, although it was a natural error. I put the shipping tickets away and found my wallet. "The number has been printed on the visa."

"I want to see the ticket itself."

I had sealed it up inside an envelope which was folded into the deepest pocket of my wallet, and it took a few seconds of fumbling to retrieve it. I had been keeping it as a souvenir, and no one had warned me it would be inspected.

I passed it over, and the two immigration officers looked closely at it, painstakingly comparing the serial number with the one inked into my passport.

After what seemed like an overzealous inspection they passed hack the ticket and I returned it to the safety of my wallet.

"What are your intentions after leaving Collago?"

"I don't know yet. I understand there is a long convalescence. I thought I'd make my plans then."

"Are you intending to return to Jethra?"

"I don't know."

"All right, Mr. Sinclair." He pressed a rubber date-stamp in the space beneath the visa, closed the passport and slid it back across the desk to me.

"You're a lucky man."

"I know," I said conventionally, although I did have my don bts.

The woman behind me stepped forward to the desk, and I walked through to the bar on the same deck. Many of the passengers I had seen in the queue in front of me were already there. I bought myself a large whisky, and stood with the others. I soon struck up a tentative conversation with two people who were heading for a retirement home on Muriseay. Their names were Thorrin and Deilidua Sineham. They came from the university town of Old Haydl in the north of Faiandland. They had bought a luxury apartment overlooking the sea in a village just outside Muriseay Town, and they promised to show me a picture of it when they next came hack from their cabin.

They seemed pleasant, ordinary people, who were at pains to explain that a luxury flat in the Archipelago cost no more to buy than a small house at home.

I had been speaking to them for a few minutes when the wonlan behind me in the queue came into the bar. She glanced briefly in my direction, then went and bought herself a drink. She came to stand near me, and as soon as the Sinehams said they were going down to their cabin, she turned and spoke to me.

"I hope you don't mind," she said. "I couldn't help overhearing. Have you really won the lottery?"

I felt myself going on the defensive. "Yes."

"I've never known anyone who's won before."

"Neither have I," I said.

"I didn't believe it was genuine. I've been buying the tickets for years, but the winning numbers are always so different from mine that I thought it must be crooked."

"I've only ever bought one ticket. I won straight away. I can still hardly believe it."

"Could I see the ticket?"

In the weeks since the news that I had won the big prize, innumerable people had asked to see the ticket, as if by looking at it or touching it some of my luck might rub off on them. It was now well thumbed and slightly frayed, but I took it out of my wallet again and showed it to her.

"And you bought this in the ordinary way?"

"Just one of those booths in the park."

A fine day in late summer: I had been waiting to meet a friend in Seigniory Park, and while I walked up and down I noticed one of the Lotterie-Collago booths. These little makeshift franchise stands were a common sight in Jethra and the other big cities, and presumably also in other parts of the world. The franchises were normally granted to the disabled, or to wounded exservicemen. Hundreds of thousands of the lottery tickets were sold every month, yet the odd thing was that you rarely saw anyone ever go to the stands and buy one. Nor did people talk openly about buying the tickets, although almost everyone I knew had bought a few tickets at one time or another, and the day the winners were announced you always saw people standing in the streets checking the list in the newspapers.

Like most people I was tempted by the prize, even though the odds against winning were so long that I had never seriously thought about taking part. But on that particular day, idling in the park, I had noticed one of the vendors. He was a soldier, probably ten years younger than me, sitting stiffly and proudly in his wooden booth, wearing a dress uniform. He was badly disfigured by wounds: he was lacking an eye and an arm, and his neck was in a brace. Taken by compassion--the guilty, helpless compassion of a civilian who managed to avoid the draft--I went across and bought one of his tickets. The transaction was conducted quickly and, for my part, furtively, as if it were pornography I was buying, or illegal drugs.

Two weeks later I discovered I had won the major prize. I would receive the athanasia treatment, and afterwards live forever. Shock and surprise, disbelief, extreme jubilation . . . these were a part of my reactions, and even now, a few weeks after the news, I had still not entirely adjusted to the prospect.

It was part of the lore of the Lotterie that winners, even those who won the subsidiary cash prizes, returned to the place where they had bought the winning ticket and gave a present or tribute to the vendor. I did this at once, even before going to register my claim, but the little stall in the park had gone and the other vendors knew nothing about him. Later, I was able to make inquiries through the Lotterie, and discovered that he had died a few days after my purchase; the missing eye, the arm, the broken neck, were just the wounds that showed.

The Lotterie claimed that twenty major prizes were awarded every month, yet one heard remarkably little about the winners. I discovered part of the reason when I registered my claim. The Lotterie counselled utmost discretion in what I said about the prize, and warned me not to talk to the media.

Although Lotterie-Collago welcomed the publicity, experience had shown that it put the winners in danger. They told me several cases of publicized winners who had been attacked in the streets; three of them had been killed.

Another reason was that because the lottery was international, only a small proportion of winners came from Faiandland. The tickets were on sale in every country of the northern continent, and throughout the Dream Archipelago.

The Lotterie staff plied me with documents and information sheets, urging me to sign over my affairs to them. I considered for a few days the mountain of business I should have to undertake on my own, then did as they suggested. From that time I had been completely in their hands. They helped me wind up my affairs in Jethra, my job, my flat, the few investments I had, they obtained the visa for me and they booked the passage on the ship. They would continue to manage my affairs until I returned. I had become a helpless functionary of their organization, swept irresistibly towards the athanasia clinic on the island of Collago.

The young woman passed me back my ticket, and I folded it away again inside its envelope, inside my wallet.

"So when will you start the treatment?" she said.

"I don't know. Presumably as soon as I arrive on Collago. But I haven't made up my mind yet."

"But surely . . . there's no question?"

"No, but I'm just not sure yet."

I was beginning to feel self-conscious, talking about this in a crowded bar with someone I hardly knew. In the last few weeks I had grown tired of other people's assumptions about the prize, and because I was not as sure about it as they were I had grown equally tired of being defensive.

I had imagined that the long slow voyage through the islands would be time for contemplation, and I was looking forward to having enough solitude to think. The islands would give me space. Yet the ship was still tied up in Seevl Town, and Jethra was just an ilour away.

Perhaps the woman sensed my reservedness, because she introduced herself to me. Her name was Mathilde Englen, and she had a doctorate in biochemistry.

She had secured a two-year attachment to the agricultural research station on the island of Semell, and she talked for some time about the problems in the islands. Because of the war, food was in short supply in some parts of the Archipelago. Now, though, several previously uninhabited islands were being cleared, and farms established. They were short of many commodities: seed-stock, implements, manpower. Her own speciality was in hybrid cereals, and several were being developed for use in the islands. She was doubtful wilether two years would be long enough for the research she had to do, but under the terms of 11cr attachment it could he renewed for a second twoyear period.

The bar was filling up as more people were cleared by the immigration officers, and as we had both finished our drinks I suggested that we go for lunch. We were the first to arrive in the dining saloon, but the service was slow and the food was indifferent. The main dish was paqua-leaves stuffed with a spiced mince; hot in flavour it was only lukewarm in temperature. I had eaten in Archipelagan-style restaurants in Jethra, so I was used to the food, but in the city the restaurants had to offer competitive service. On the ship there was no competition. At first disappointed, we saw no point in ruining the day by complaining, and concentrated instead on talking to each other.

By the time we had finished the ship was under way. I went up to the afterdeck and stood by the rail in the sunshine, watching dark Seevl and the distant mainland slipping away behind us.

That night I had a vivid dream about Mathilde, and when I met her in the morning my perception of her had undergone a subtle change.

6

As the ship sailed further south, and the weather became endlessly warm and sunny, there was no time for contemplating the pros and cons of my prize.

I was distracted by the scenery, the unfolding panorama of the islands, and Mathilde was constantly on my mind.

I had not really expected to meet someone on the ship, but from the second day I thought of almost nothing else. Mathilde, I think, was glad of my company, and flattered by my interest in her, but that is as far as it went. I found that I was pursuing her with such single-minded intent that even I became self-conscious about it. I soon ran out of excuses for being with her, because she was the sort of woman who made excuses necessary. Every time I approached her I had to think of some new device: a drink in the bar?, a stroll around the deck?, a few minutes ashore? After these minor excursions she always slipped away with an excuse of her own: a short nap, hair to be washed, a letter to write. I knew she was not interested in me in the way I was interested in her, but that was no deterrent.

In some ways it was inevitable we should spend time together. We were the same age group--she was thirty-one, two years older than myself--and we came from the same sort of Jethran background. She, like me, felt outnumbered by the retirement couples on board with us, but unlike me made friends with several of them. I found her intelligent and shrewd, and, after a few drinks, possessed of an unexpectedly bawdy sense of humour. She was slim and fair-haired, read a lot of books, had been politically active in Jethra (we found we had a friend of a friend in conimon) and on the one or two occasions we were able to leave the ship briefly, she revealed herself knowledgeable about island customs.

The dream that started it all was one of those rare lucid dreams that are still comprehensible after waking. It was extremely simple. In a mildly erotic way I was on an island with a young woman, readily identified as Mathilde, and we were in love.

When I saw Mathilde in the morning I felt such a surge of spontaneous warmth that I acted as if we had known each other for years, rather than just met briefly the day before. Probably out of surprise, Mathilde responded with almost equal warmth, and before either of us realized it a pattern had been set. From then I pursued her, and she, with tact, firmness and a generous amusement, eluded me.

My other main preoccupation on the ship was my discovery of the islands.

I never tired of standing at the rail of the ship to watch the view, and our frequent calls at ports on the way were all rich visual experiences.

The shipping line had fixed an immense, stylized chart on the wall of the main saloon, and this showed the entire Midway Sea and all the principal islands and shipping routes. A first reaction to the chart was the complexity of the Archipelago and the sileer quantity of islands, and amazement that ships' crews could navigate safely. The sea carried a lot of shipping: in a typical day on deck I would see twenty or thirty cargo ships, at least one or two steamers like the one I was on, and innumerable small interisland ferries.

Around some of the larger islands there was traffic of privately owned pleasure boats, and fleets of fishing boats were common sights.

It was generally said that the islands of the Archipelago were impossible to count, although upwards of ten thousand had been named. The whole of the Midway Sea had been surveyed and charted, but quite apart from the inhabited islands, and the larger uninhabited ones, there was a multitude of tiny islets, crags and rocks, many of which appeared and disappeared with the tides.

From the chart I learned that the islands which lay immediately to the south of Jethra were known as the Torqui Group; the main island, Derril, was one we called at on the third day. Beyond these to the south lay the Lesser Serques. The islands were grouped for administrative and geographical reasons, but each island was, in theory at least, politically and economically independent.

In simple terms, the Midway Sea girdled the world at the equator, but it was larger by far than either of the two continental land masses lying to north and south of it. In one part of the world, the sea extended to within a few degrees of the South Pole, and in the northern hemisphere the country called Koillin, one of those with which we were presently at war, actually had part of its territory crossing the equator; in general, though, the continents were cool and the islands were tropical.

One of the anecdotal facts taught in schools about the Dream Archipelago, and one which I heard the other passengers repeat many times, was that the islands were so numerous and so close together that from every single island at least another seven could be seen. I never doubted this, except to think it was probably an understatement; even from the relatively low eminence of the ship's deck I could frequently see more than twelve separate islands.

It was extraordinary to reflect that I had spent my life in Jethra without awareness of this totally strange place. Two days' sailing from Jethra and I felt I had travelled to another world, yet I was still closer to home than, say, the mountain passes in the north of Faiandland.

And if I continued to travel, south or west or east through the Archipelago, I could sail for months and still see the same unfolding diversity, impossible to describe, impossible even to absorb when seeing it.

Large, small, rocky, fertile, mountainous and flat; these simple variations could be seen in an afternoon, to just one side of the ship. The senses became dulled to the scenic variety, and the imagination took over. I began to see the islands as designs on a painted cyclorama, one hauled smoothly past the ship, endlessly inventive, meticulously fabricated.

But then came our ports of call, confounding the fancy.

Our brief visits to islands were the real regulators of the ship's day.

Ports disrupted everything. I soon learned this, and gave up trying to eat or sleep by the clock. The best time to sleep was mid-voyage, because then the ship had a steady rhythm to it, and the food in the restaurant was also better, because then the crew was eating.

The ship was always expected, whether we docked at noon or midnight, and its arrival was obviously an event of some importance. Crowds were generally waiting on the quay, and behind them stood rows of trucks and carts to take away the cargo and mail we brought. Then there was the chaotic exchange of deck passengers, and as they came or left there were always arguments, greetings or farewells, suddenly remembered last messages shouted to the shore, disrupting our otherwise placid existence. In the ports we were reminded that we were a ship: something that called, something that carried, something from outside.

I always left the ship when I could, and made brief explorations of the little towns. My impressions were superficial: I felt like a tourist, unable to see beyond the war memorials and palm trees to the people beyond. Yet the Archipelago was not meant for tourists, and the towns had no guides or currency exchanges, no museums of local culture. On several islands I tried to buy picture postcards to send home, but when at last I found some I discovered that mail to the north could only be sent by special permit. By trial and error I worked out a few things for myself: the usage of the archaic non-decimal currency, the difference between the various kinds of bread and meat on sale, and a ruleof-thumb guide to how prices compared with home.

Mathilde sometimes accompanied me on these expeditions, and her presence was enough to blind me to surroundings. All the time I was with her I knew I was nlaking a mistake, yet she continued to attract me. I think we were both relieved, although in my case it was a perverse kind of relief, when on the fourth day we came to Semell Town and she disembarked. We went through the motions of making all arrangement to meet again, even though her voice was glib with insincerity. When she was ashore I stood by the ship's rail and watched her walk along the concrete wharf, her pale hair shining in the sunlight. A car was waiting to meet her. I saw a man load her bags into the back, and before she climbed in she turned towards the ship. She waved briefly to me, then she was gone.

Semell was a dry island, with olive trees growing on the rocky hills.

Old men sat in the shade; I heard a donkey braying somewhere behind the town.

After Semell I began to tire of the ship and its slow, devious voyage through the islands. I was bored with the noises and routines of the ship: the rattle of chains, the constant sound from the engine and the pumps, the voluble dialect conversations of the deck passengers. I had given up eating on the ship, and now bought fresh bread, cooked meat and fruit whenever we stopped at an island. I drank too much. I found the few conversations I had with other passengers repetitive and predictable.

I had boarded the ship in a state of extreme receptivity, open to the newt experience of travel, to the discovery of the Archipelago. Now, though, I began to miss my friends at home, and my family. I remembered the last conversation I had had with my father, the night before I left Jethra: he was against the prize and feared that as a result of it I would choose to stay on in the islands.

I was abandoning much for the sake of a lottery ticket, and I still questioned what I was doing.

Part of the answer lay in the manuscript I had written a couple of summers before. I had brought it with me, stuffed into my leather holdall, but I had packed it without re-reading it, just as I had never re-read it since leaving the cottage. The writing of my life, of telling myself the truth, had been an end in itself.

Since that long summer in the Murinan Hills overlooking Jethra I had entered a muted phase of life. There had been no upsets, few passions. I had had lovers, but they had been superficial relationships, and I had made a number of new acquaintances but no new friends. The country had recovered from the recession that put me out of a job, and I had gone back to work, But writing the manuscript had not been a wasted effort. The words still held the truth. It had become a kind of prophecy, in the pure sense of being a teaching. I therefore had a feeling that somewhere in those pages would be some kind of internal guidance about the lottery prize. It was this I needed, because there was no logical reason for refusing it. My doubts came from within.

But as the ship moved into hotter latitudes, my mental and physical sloth increased. I left my manuscript in my cabin, I postponed any thoughts about the prize.

On the eighth day we came to open sea, with the next group of islands a faint darkening on the southern horizon. Here was one of the geographical boundaries and beyond it lay the Lesser Serques, with Muriseay at their heart.

We made only one islandfall in the Serques before Muriseay, and by the early afternoon of the next day the island was in sight.

After the confusion of islands behind us, arriving off Muriseay was like once again approaching the coast of a continent. It seemed to stretch forever into the distance beyond the coast. Bluegreen hills ran hack from the coastline, dotted with white-painted villas and divided up by winding, curving highways that strode across the valleys on great viaducts. Beyond the hills, almost on the horizon as it seemed, I could see brown-purple mountains, crowned with cloud.

At the very edge of the sea, following the coastline, was a ribbon development of apartments and hotels, modern, tall, balconied. The beaches below were crowded with people, and brightly coloured by huge sunshades and cafeterias. I borrowed a pair of binoculars and stared at the beaches as we passed. Muriseay, seen thus, was like the stereotype of the Archipelago depicted in films, or described in pulp fiction. In the Faiandland culture the Dream Archipelago was synonymous with a leisured class of sun-loving emigrés, or the indigenous islanders. Depictions of the sort of small islands I had been passing were rare; there was more plot material in a heavily populated place like Muriseay. Roniantic novels and adventure films were frequently set in a never-never world of Archipelagan exotica, complete with casinos, speed-boats and jungle hide-outs. The natives were villainous, corruptible or simple; the visiting class either wealthy and self-indulgent, or scheming madmen. Of course, I recognized the fiction in this fiction, but it was nevertheless potent and memorable.

So in seeing at last an island of real economic substance I viewed it with a kind of double vision. One part of me was still receptive and involved, trying to see and understand everything in objective terms. But another part, deeper and more irrational, could not help but see this concrete-slab coastline of Muriseay with the received glamour of popular culture.

The beaches were therefore crowded with the indulgent rich, tanning themselves in the golden sunshine of Muriseay's legendary heat. Everyone was a tax-exile, philanderer or remittanceman; the modern yachts moored a short distance offshore were the scenes of nightly gambling and murder, a place for playboys and high-class whores, corrupt and fascinating. Behind the modern apartment blocks I visualized the squalid hovels of the peasant islanders, parasitic on the visitors, contemptuous of them, yet servile. Just like the films, just like the cheap paperbacks that filled the bookstalls of Jethra.

Thorrin and Dellidua Sineham were on deck, standing beside the rail further down the ship. They too were gazing interestedly across at the shore, pointing at the coastal buildings, talking together. The tattily romantic version of Muriseay faded, and I walked down and lent them the glasses. Those villas and apartments would be mostly occupied by decent, ordinary people like the Sinehams. I stayed with them for a while, listening to them talk excitedly of their new home and life. Thorrin's brother and his wife were already here, and they were in the same village, and they had been getting the apartment ready.

Later, I went back to my place alone and watched the terrain change as we moved further south. Here the hills came down to the sea, breaking as cliffs, and the blocks of flats were hidden from view; soon we were passing shores as wild as any I had seen in the islands. The ship was close inshore, and through the glasses I could see the flash of birds in the trees that grew to the edge of the cliffs.

We reached what I first assumed was the niouth of a river, and the ship turned and headed upstream. Here the water was deep and calm, a stupendous bottle green, the sun shafting down through it. On either bank was dense jungle of monstrous aroids, unmoving in the humid silence.

After a few minutes in this airless channel it became clear that we had turned inland between an offshore island and the mainland, because it opened out into a vast, placid lagoon, on the far side of which was the sprawl of Muriseay Town.

Now, with the end of the long voyage imminent, I felt a strange sense of insecurity. The ship had become a symbol of safety, the object that had fed me and carried me, that I returned to after venturing ashore. I had grown used to the boat, and knew my way about it like I knew the apartment I had left in J

ethra. To leave it would he to take a second step into strangeness. We impose familiarity on our surroundings; from the deck of the ship the scenery merely passed, but now I had to disembark, set foot in the islands.

It was a return to the inner-directed self I had temporarily lost when I boarded the ship. Unaccountably I felt nervous of Muriseay, yet there was no logical reason for this. It was just a transit, a place to change ships. Also, I was expected in Muriseay. There was an office of the Lotterie-Collago here, and the next leg of the journey was one they would arrange.

I stood in the prow of the ship until it had docked, then went back to find the Sinehams. I wished them luck, said goodbye, then went down to my cabin to collect my holdall.

A few minutes later I was heading up the quay, looking for a taxi to take me into town.

7

The offices of Lotterie-Collago were in a shaded side street about five minutes' drive from the harbour. I paid off the taxi driver and he drove quickly away, the dusty old saloon car bouncing noisily on the cobbles. At the far end of the street the car turned into the harsh brilliance of sunlight, joining the chaos of traffic that roared past.

The offices were like a large showroom, fronting the street with two plate glass windows. Behind, there were no lights on but at the far end, away from the doors and behind a small forest of potted plants, there was a desk and some cabinets. A young woman sat there, looking through a magazine.

I tried the doors, but they were locked. The young woman heard me, looked up and acknowledged me. I saw her take down some keys.

I was still only a few minutes away from the lulling, lazy routines of shipboard life, but already Muriseay Town had instilled in me an acute sense of culture shock. Nothing I had seen in any of the small islands had prepared me for this busy, hot and noisy city, nor was it like anywhere I knew at home.

Muriseay, experienced raw, seemed like a chaos of cars, people and buildings. Everyone nloved with astonishing yet mysterious purpose. Cars were driven faster than anyone would have dared in Jethra, accompanied by heavy braking, sharp cornering and constant use of the horn. Street signs, in two languages, obeyed no apparent overall system, nor even consistency in their use. Shops in the streets were open to the world, quite unlike the prim emporia of Jethra's main boulevards, and their goods spilled out in a colourful mess across the pavements. Discarded boxes and bottles were all over the place. People lounged around in the sun, lying in the grassy squares, leaning against the walls of buildings or sitting under the bright canopies of the open-air bars and restaurants. One street had been completely blocked by what appeared to be an impromptu football match, causing my driver to swear at me and reverse violently and dangerously into the main street. Further complicating the city were the buses, which hurtled down the centres of the carriageways, passengers bulging from windows and doorways, and claiming right of way by sheer nerve alone. The layout of the city seemed to have no overall design, being a warren of criss-crossing narrow streets between the ramshackle brick buildings; I was used to the stately avenues of Jethra, built, according to tradition, sufficiently wide for a full company of Seigniorial troops to march abreast.

All this was glimpsed and absorbed in the few minutes I was in the taxi, whirled through the streets in a sort of car I had only ever before seen in movies. It was a huge, battered old saloon, spattered with dust and dried mud, the windscreen plastered with dead insects. Inside, the seats were covered with synthetic fur, and were far too soft for comfort; one sank into them with a feeling of excessive and cloying luxury. The fascia of the car was tarnished chrome and peeling wood veneer; the inside of the windscreen was stuck all over with photographs of women and children. A dog lay asleep on the back seat, and shrilling, distorted pop music was blasting from the radio. The driver steered with only one hand on the wheel, the other out of the window and clasping the roof, slapping in time with the music. The car swooped through corners, setting up a banging noise from the suspension and a rocking motion inside.

The whole city was a new kind of sensation: a feeling of careless indifference to many things I took for granted_quiet, safety, laws, consideration towards others. Muriseay Town seemed to he a city in eternal conflict with itself. Noise, heat, dust, white light; a teeming, shouting and colliding city, uneven and untidy, yet charged with life.

But I did not feel unsafe, and neither was I excited, except in a way best described as cerebral. The taxi driver's careering progress through the milling traffic was something that took the breath away, but it was in a larger context of confusion and disorder. A car driven like that in Jethra would certainly crash within a few moments, if not stopped by the police, but in Muriseay Town everything was at the same level of chaos. It was as if I had somehow crossed over into another universe, one where the degree of activity had been perceptibly increased: reality's tuner had been adjusted, so noises were louder, colours were brighter, crowds were more dense, heat was greater, time moved faster. I felt a curious sense of diminished responsibility, as if I were in a dream. I could not be hurt or endangered in Muriseay, because I was protected by the dangerous chaos of normality. The car would not crash, those ancient leaning buildings would never fall, the crowds would always skip out of the way of the traffic, because we were in a place of higher response, a place where mundane disasters simply never occurred.

It was an exhilarating, dizzying feeling, one that told me that to survive here I had to adjust to the local _ad hoc_ rules. Here I could do things I never dared at home. Sober responsibilities were behind me.

So as I stood by the Lotterie-Collago office, waiting for the doors to be unlocked, I was still in the early throes of this new awareness. On the ship, receptive to the new though I had thought myself to be, in fact I had been moving in a protective bubble of my own life. I had brought attitudes and expectations with me. After just a few minutes in Muriseay the bubble had been popped, and sensations were still pouring in on me.

The lock rattled and one of the two doors swung open.

The young woman said nothing, but stared at me.

"I'm Peter Sinclair," I said. "I was told to come here as soon as I landed."

"Come in." She held the door open, and I walked in to the shock of air conditioning. The office was dry, refrigerated, and the chill of it made me cough. I followed the girl to her desk.

"I've got you down as Robert Sinclair. Is that you?"

"Yes. I don't use my first name."

My eyes too had needed to adjust to the relative dimness of the office, because when she got to her desk and faced me, I noticed the girl's appearance for the first time. She bore a remarkable physical similarity to Mathilde Englen.

"Won't you sit down?" She indicated the visitors' chair.

I did as she said, making a small production of putting my holdall to one side. I needed a few moments to collect myself. The resemblance between her and Mathilde was extraordinary! Not in detail, but in colouring, hair, body shape. I supposed that if the two women could be seen together it would not be so obvious, but for the last few days I had been holding a mental image of Mathilde and suddenly to meet this girl came as a distinct surprise. The generalities of my memory image were fulfilled exactly.

She was saying: "My name is Seri Fuiten, and I am your Lotterie representative here. Any help I can give you while you're here, or--"

It was the company speech, and it drifted over and past me. She was shaped in the company mould: she was wearing the same bright red uniform of skirt and jacket I had seen on the staff in the Jethran Lotterie office, the sort of clothes that are worn in hotel receptions, car rental firms, shipping offices. It was attractive in a bland way, but sexless and multi-national. Her one gesture to individuality was a small badge pinned to her lapel: it had the face of a well-known pop singer.

I did find her attractive, but then the company image supposed I would.

Beyond that, the coincidence with Mathilde was setting up distracting resonances.

I said, when she had finished her patter: "Have you been waiting here just for me?"

"Somebody had to. You're two days late."

"I'd no idea."

"It's all right. We contacted the shipping line. I haven't been sitting here for two days."

I judged her to be in her late twenties, and either married or living with someone. No ring, but that meant nothing anymore.

She opened a drawer in the desk and brought out a neatly packaged folder of papers.

"You can have this," she said. "It tells you everything you need to know about the treatment."

"Well, I haven't quite decided yet--"

"Then read this."

I took the file from her and glanced through the contents. There were several glossily printed pages of photographs, presumably of the athanasia clinic, and further on a series of questions and answers printed out. Going through the sheets gave me the chance to look away from her. What had happened? Was I seeing Mathilde in her? Unsuccessful with one woman, I find another who happens to look rather like her, and so transfer my attention?

With Mathilde I had always felt I was making a mistake, yet I went on with the pursuit; she, nobody's fool, had deflected me. But suppose I _had_

been making a mistake, that I had mistaken Mathilde for someone else? In a reversal of causality, I had thought Mathilde was this girl, the Lotterie rep?

While I had been ostensibly going through the photographs, Seri Fulten had opened what I presumed was the Lotterie file on me.

She said: "I see you're from Faiandland. Jethra."

"Yes."

"My family came from there originally. What's it like?"

"Parts of it are very beautiful. The centre, round the Seignior's Palace. But they've built a lot of factories in the last few years, and they're ugly." I had no idea what to say. Until I left Jethra I had never really thought about it, except as the place I lived in and took for granted.

I said, after a pause: "I've already forgotten it. For the last few days all I've been aware of is the islands. I'd no idea there were so many."

"You'll never leave the islands."

She said it in the same colourless way she had recited the company speech, but I sensed that this was a different kind of slogan.

"Why do you say that?"

"It's just a saying. There's always somewhere new to go, another island."

The short fair hair, the skin that showed pale through the superficiality of tan. I suddenly remembered finding Mathilde on the boat deck, sunbathing with her chin turned up to avoid a shadow on her neck.

"Can I get you a drink?" Seri said.

"Yes, please. What have you got?"

"I'll have to look. The cabinet's usually locked." She opened another drawer, looking for a key. "Or we could check you into your hotel, and have a drink there."

"I'd prefer that," I said. I had been travelling too long; I wanted to dump my luggage.

"I'll have to check the reservation. We were expecting you two days ago."

She picked up the phone, listened to the receiver then worked the rest up and down a few times. She frowned, and drew in her breath sharply. After a few seconds I heard the line click, and she started dialling.

The number at the other end was a long time answering, and she sat with the receiver against her ear, staring across the desk at me.

I said: "Do you work here alone?"

"There's usually the manager and two other girls. We're supposed to be closed today. It's a public holiday--Hello!" I heard a voice at the other end, sounding tinnily across the quiet showroom. "Lotterie-Collago. I'm checking the reservation for Robert Sinclair. Do you still have it?"

She grimaced at me, and stared out of the window with that vacant expression worn by people waiting on the phone.

I got up and sauntened about the office. Hanging on the walls were a number of colour photographs of the Lotterie's clinic on Collago; I recognized some of the pictures from my glance through the brochure. I saw clean modern buildings, a number of white-painted chalets set out on a lawn, flowerbeds, jagged mountains in the distance behind. Everyone seemed to be smiling.

Several photographs were of lottery winners arriving at or leaving the island, handshakes and smiles, arms around shoulders. Slots of the interiors revealed the antiseptic cleanliness of a hospital with the luxurious appointments of an hotel.

I was reminded of the sort of photographs you sometimes saw in brochures for holidays. One I remembered in particular: a skiresort in the mountains of northern Faiandland. It had exactly the same overstated atmosphere of jollity and friendship, the same garish colours from a salesman's samples book.

At the far end of the office was a waiting area, with several comfortable chairs surrounding a low, glass-topped table. On this there was a package of lottery tickets, placed there to be found and looked at. I picked them up and flicked through them. Each one had been neatly defaced with an overprinted legend (SAMPLE, NOT FOR SALE), but in every other respect they were the same as the one that had won the prize for me.

At that moment I managed to identify at last the vague feeling of unease I had had ever since winning.

The lottery was something that existed for other people. I was the wrong person to have won.

Lotterie-Collago gave athanasia treatment as its principal prize: genuine immortality, medically guaranteed. The clinic claimed a success rate of 100 per cent; no one who ever received the treatment had yet died. The oldest recipient was said to be one hundred and sixty-nine years old, had the physical appearance of a woman in her mid-forties, and, it was claimed, was in full possession of all her faculties. She was often featured in the Lotterie's television advertising: playing tennis, dancing, solving crosswords.

Before all this I had sometimes made the sardonic comment that if eternal life meant a century and a half of crossword puzzles, I was content to die of natural causes.

There was also a feeling I had never entirely thrown off, that the award always went to the wrong kind of person: in short, it went to people who entered lotteries, who were deserving only of luck.

In spite of what I now knew was the Lotterie's advice, prizewinners were sometimes given a great deal of publicity. More often than not, under media examination these winners turned out to be dull, ordinary people from narrow backgrounds, who lacked ambition or inspiration, and who were patently incapable of envisaging themselves iiving forever. In interviews they would usually come out with homilies about devoting their new lives to good or public works, but the sameness of these sentiments seemed to indicate that they had been prompted by the Lotterie. This aside, their main ambition was generally to see their grandchildren grow up, or take a long holiday or retire from work and settle down in a nice house somewhere.

Although I had derided the prosaic aspirations of such innocent winners, now that I had become one myself I found I had not much more to offer. All I had done to deserve the prize was to take temporary, and ultimately meaningless, pity on a crippled soldier in a park. I was no less dull or ordinary than any of the other prize-winners. I had no use for a prolonged life. Before the lottery I had lived a safe, uncontroversial life in Jethra, and after the athanasia treatment I should probably continue it. According to the publicity, I could expect to do so for at least another century and a half, and possibly as much as four or five hundred years.

Athanasia increased the quantity of life, but offered nothing for the quality.

Even so, who would turn down a chance of it? I feared death rather less now' than I had done when I was an adolescent; if death was a loss of consciousness then it held no horrors. But I had always been lucky with my health, and like many people who escape illness I dreaded pain and disability, and the prospect of actually dying, of going through a helpless decline, suffering pain and immobility, was something I could not think about without shrinking away. The athanasia clinic gave treatment that totally cleansed the system, that controlled cell regeneration indefinitely. It gave immunity from the degenerative diseases like cancer and thrombosis, it protected against viral diseases and it ensured the retention of all muscular and mental abilities. After the treatment, I should remain forever at my present physical age of twenty-nine.

I wanted that; I could not deny it. Yet I knew the unfairness of the Lotterie system, both from my own short experience of it and from the many passionate criticisms that had been voiced in public. It was unfair; I knew I was unworthy of it.

But who was worthy? The treatment effectively provided a cure for cancer, but hundreds of thousands of people still died of the disease every year. The Lotterie said that cancer could not he cured, except as a by-product of their treatment. The same was true of heart disease, of blindness, of senility, of ulcers, of a dozen serious ailments that marred or shortened the lives of millions of people. The Lotterie said the treatment, expensive and difficult, could not he given to everyone. The only fair way, the only unquestionably democratic and undiscriminating way, was by lottery.

Hardly a month passed without the Lotterie being criticized. Were there not, for instance, genuinely deserving cases? People who had devoted their lives to the care of others? Artists, musicians, scientists, whose work would be curtailed by the inevitable decline? Religious leaders, peacemakers, inventors? Names were frequently put fonvard by the media, by politicians, all intending to further the apparent quality of the world.

Under such pressure, the Lotterie had several years before proposed a scheme designed to counter the criticism. A panel of international judges was appointed to sit annually, and every year they nominated a small number of people who, in their opinion, were worthy of the elixir of life. The Lotterie then undertook to provide the treatment.

To the surprise of most ordinary people, almost all of these laureates declined the treatment. Notable amongst them was an eminent author named Visker Deloinne.

As a result of his nomination, Deloinne later wrote an impassioned book called _Renunciation_. In this he argued that to accept athanasia was to deny death, and as life and death were inextricably linked it was a denial of life too. All his novels, he said, had been written in the knowledge of his inevitable death, and none could or would have been written without it. He expressed his life through literature, but this was in essence no different from the way other people expressed their own lives. To aspire to live forever would be to acquire living at the expense of life.

Deloinne died of cancer two years after _Renunciation_ was published. It was now recognized as his greatest work, his highest literary achievement. I had read it while still at school. It had had a profoundly moving effect on me, yet here I was, halfway to Collago, halfway to eternal living.

At the other end of the office I heard Seri put down the telephone receiver, and I turned towards her.

"They had to let your reservation go," she said. "But they've booked you into another hotel."

"Can you tell me how to find it?"

She picked up a raffia basket from the floor, and placed it on the desk in front of her. She took off her red jacket, and laid it down between the handles.

"I'm leaving now. I'll show you where it is."

She locked the desk drawers, checked that an inner door was closed, and we went out into the road. Heat assaulted me, and I looked around and above me in a reflexive gesture, thinking stupidly that some hot-air vent must be blowing out from above. It was just the climate, the tropical humidity. I was wearing only light slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, but with my holdall I felt totally unadapted to this place.

We walked to the main street and headed through the crowds. The shops and doorways were open, lights were blazing, and the traffic rushed past in a bedlam of noise and speed. It was all vested with a _purpose_ I had never noticed at home; everyone seemed to know where they were going, and obeying the chaotic rules of this unreal place.

Seri led the way along the densely crowded pavements, passing restaurants, coffee shops, strip clubs, bookstalls, cinemas. Everyone seemed to be jostling or shouting, no one moved slowly or silently. On several corners, open-air kitchens were selling skewered meat on rice, served in flimsy paper wrappers. Meat, bread and vegetables lay bare to the hot air in the open_fronted shops, attracting hundreds of flies. Transistor radios, strapped to the wooden uprights of stalls, gave crackling, distorted pop music to the uproar. A water truck roared down the road, sluicing the street and pavement with total disregard for anyone there; afterwards, vegetable peelings collected in the gutters. Through it all, a sickly, pervasive scent, far too sweet and unwholesome: perhaps it was rancid meat, or incense burned to smother the smell of dung. It had an intangible "hot" quality, as if the climate brought the perfume seeping from the walls and streets themselves.

Within a few moments I was drenched with sweat, and it was almost as if the humid air were condensing on me. I paused once or twice to switch hands on my holdall. When we reached the hotel we went straight inside, into the welcome cold of air conditioning.

Checking in was a brief formality, but before giving me the room key, the clerk asked to see my passport. I handed it over to him. He placed it, without looking at it, behind the counter.

I waited for a few moments, but there was no sign it would reappear.

"What do you want the passport for?" I said.

"It has to he registered with the police. You may collect it on your departure."

Something made me suspicious, so I moved over to where Seri was waiting.

I said to her: "What's going on?"

"Have you got a ten-credit note?"

"I think so."

"Give it to him. Ancient local custom."

"Extortion, you mean."

"No . . . it's just cheaper than the police. They'll charge you twenty-five."

I returned to the desk, passed over the bill and got my key and passport in exchange; no regrets, no explanations, no apology. The clerk impressed a rubber stamp beside the Archipelago visa.

"Are you going to stay and have a drink with me?" I said to Seri.

"Yes, but don't you want to unpack?"

"I'd like a shower. That'll take about a quarter of an hour. Shall we meet in the bar?"

She said: "I think I'll go home and change my clothes. I live just a short way from here."

I went up to the room, lay on the bed for a few minutes, then stripped off my clothes and showered. The water was pale brown and felt very hard; the soap barely lathered. Sonic twenty nlinutes later, refreshed and wearing clean clothes, I went down to the bar at street level. This was actually outside the hotel, opening on to a side road, but there was a glass canopy and a number of high-pressure fans kept the air cool around the tables. Darkness had fallen while I was inside. I ordered a large beer, and Seri arrived shortly afterwards. She had changed into a flared, loosefitting skirt and semi-transparent cheesecloth blouse, looking less like a company stereotype and more like a woman. She ordered a glass of iced wine, sitting across the table from me, looking relaxed and very young.

She asked me a number of questions about myself: how I had come to buy the lottery ticket, what I did for a living, where my family came from, and various other questions that people ask each other when they have just met. I was having difficulty making her out. I was unable to tell whether these harmless personal questions were prompted by polite, genuine or professional interest. I had to keep reminding myself that she was my Lotterie-Collago contact here, that she was just doing her job. After the celibacy of the ship, aggravated by Mathilde's evasions, it was disconcerting to be sitting casually with such an attractive and friendly woman. I could not help looking at her appraisingly: she had a small, neat figure, and a pretty face. She was obviously intelligent, but holding something back, keeping a distance, and I found it very enticing. She made conversation with apparent interest, leaning slightly towards me, smiling a lot, but there was also a sense of withdrawal in her. Perhaps she was on overtime, hosting a company client; perhaps she was merely being cautious with a man she had only just met.

She told me she had been born on Seevl, the sombre island that lay offshore from Jethra. Her parents were Jethrans but they had moved to Seevi just before the war broke out. Her father had been an administrator at a theological college there, but she had left home in her early teens. Since then, she had been moving about the islands, drifting from one job to another.

Both parents were now dead. She said little, changed the subject quickly.

We had two more drinks each, and I was starting to feel hungry. The prospect of spending the rest of the evening with Seri was very appealing, so I asked her where we could find a good restaurant.

But she said: "I'm sorry, I've got a date this evening. You can eat at the hotel. It's all on the Lotterie. Or any of the Salayan restaurants around here. They're all excellent. Have you tried Salay food?"

"In Jethra." It was probably not the same, but then eating alone would not be the same, either.

I regretted suggesting the meal because it had obviously reminded her of what she was doing for the rest of the evening. She drank the remainder of her wine, then stood up.

"I'm sorry I have to leave. It was nice to get to know you."

"Same here," I said.

"Tomorrow morning, meet me at the office. I'll try to book you a passage to Collago. A ship leaves about once a week, but you've just missed one. There are a number of different routes. I'll see what's available."

For a moment I glimpsed the other Seri, the one who wore the uniform.

I confirmed I would be there, and we said goodnight. She walked off into the perfumed night and did not look back.

I ate alone in a crowded, noisy Salay restaurant. The table was set for two, and I felt more isolated than I had done since leaving home. It was weak and stupid of me to fix on the first two women I met, but I had done so and there was nothing I could reverse. Seri's company had successfully rid me of thoughts of Mathilde, but she seemed set to become a second Mathilde. Was her date tonight just the first evasion of me?

After the meal, I walked through the rowdy narrow streets of Muriseay, lost my way, found where I was, then returned to the hotel. My room was air-conditioned to the point of refrigeration, so I threw open the windows and lay awake for hours, listening to arguments, music and motorbikes.

8

I overslept, so it was late morning by the time I walked around to the Lotterie office. I had awoken to a feeling of indifference about Seri, determined not to start another pursuit. I would accept her for what she was, a Lotterie employee doing her job. When I went inside the office Seri was not there, and I felt a quite distinct pang of disappointment, making a fraud of my new determination.

Two other young women, both wearing the smart company outfit, were working behind desks: one was speaking on the telephone, the other was typing.

I said to the one at the typewriter: "Is Seri Fulten here, please?"

"Seri isn't coming in today. May I help you?"

"I was supposed to be meeting her here."

"Are you Peter Sinclair?"

"Yes."

The girl's expression changed; that subtle shift from formality to recognition. "Seri left a message for you." She tore a sheet from a notepad.

"She asked you to call at this address."

I looked at it but of course it meant nothing to me. "How do I find this?"

"It's just off the Plaza. Behind the bus station."

I had crossed the Plaza during my late-night walk, but no longer had any idea how to find it.

"I'll have to go by cab," I said.

"Would you like me to call one for you?" she said, and lifted the telephone.

While we were waiting for the car to arrive, the girl said: "Are you a lottery winner?"

"Yes, of course."

"Seri didn't say." The girl smiled, hinting at intrigue, then looked down at her work. I went to sit at the glass_topped table.

A man appeared from the inner office, glanced briefly in my direction, then went to the desk Seri had been using the day before. There was something about the office-life quality to the Lotterie that made me uneasy, and I remembered how my doubts had been focused when I was here before. The bright and reassuringly confident image projected by the staff and their sunroundings made me think of cabin crew on aircraft, who attempt to calm nervous passengers with professional blandness. But the Lotterie's product surely did not need to be backed up with reassurances? It was paramount that the treatment was safe, or so it was claimed.

At last the taxi arrived, and I was taken the short distance across the centre of town to the address Seri had left.

Another side street, bleached by sunlight: shops were shuttered, a van waited by the kerb with its engine running, children squatted in shadowed doorways. As the taxi drove away I noticed fresh water was running in the gutters on both sides of the street; a dog limped forward and licked at it, glancing to the side between gulps.

The address was a stout wooden door, leading through a cool corridor to a courtyard. Unclaimed mail was scattered on the floor and large containers of household waste spilled out across the uncut grass. On the far side of the courtyard, in another corridor, was an elevator, and I node up in this to the third floor. Directly opposite was the numbered door I was looking for.

Seri opened the door within a few seconds of my ring.

"Oh, you're here," she said. "I was just about to telephone the office."

"I slept late," I said. "I didn't realize there was anything urgent."

"There isn't . . . come in for a moment."

I followed her in, any remaining intention of seeing her as a mere employee confounded by this new insight into her. How many lottery winners did she normally invite round to her flat? Today she was wearing a revealing open_neck shirt and a denim skirt, buttoned down the front. She looked as she had done the night before: youthful, attractive, divorced from the image the job gave her. I remembered that feeling of resentment when she left me to meet someone else, and while she closed the door I realized I was hoping the apartment would show no signs of some other man in her life. Inside it was very small: to one side there was a tiny bathroom--through the half-open door I glimpsed antique plumbing and clothes hanging up to dry--and to the other was a cramped living-cum-bedroom, cluttered with hooks, records and furniture.

The bed, a single, was neatly made. The apartment backed on to a main street, and because the windows were open the room was warm and noisy.

"Would you like a drink?" Seri said.

"Yes please." I had drunk a whole bottle of wine the evening before, and was feeling the worse for it. Another would clear my head . . . but Seri opened a bottle of mineral water and poured two glasses.

"I can't get you a passage," she said, sitting on the edge of her bed.

"I tried one shipping line, but they won't confirm reservations yet. The earliest I call get you on is next week."

"Whatever is available," I said.

There the business side of our meeting came to an end, as far as I knew.

She could have told me this in the office, or left the message with one of the other staff, but clearly that was not all.

I had drunk my mineral water quickly; I liked it. "Why aren't you at work today?"

"I've taken a couple of days off, and I need the break. I'm thinking of going up into the hills for the day. Would you like to come with me?"

"Is it far?"

"An hour or two, depending on whether the bus breaks down or not. Just a trip. I want to get out of town for a few hours."

"All right," I said. "I'd like that."

"I know it's a bit of a rush, but there's a bus in a few minutes' time.

I was hoping you would get here earlier, so we could talk about it more. Do you need to collect anything from the hotel?"

"I don't think so. You say we'll be back by this evening?"

"Yes."

Seri finished her drink, picked up her shoulder bag, and we went down to the road. The bus station was a short walk away: a dark, cavernous building with two ancient motor buses parked in the centre. Seri led the way to one of them. It was already more than half full, and the aisle between the two double rows of seats was blocked by other passengers standing up to talk to their friends. We squeezed past, and found a pair of seats near the back.

"Where are we going?" I said.

"A village I found last year. A few visitors go there, but it's usually very quiet. You can get a good meal, and there's a river where you can swim."

A few minutes later the driver climbed aboard, and moved down the bus taking the fares. When he reached us I offered to pay, but Seri already had a note in her hand.

"This is on the Lotterie," she said.

The bus was soon out of the centre of the city and moving through broader streets lined with elderly and crumbling apartment buildings. The dnabness of the area was emphasized by the pure white light of the midday sun, and relieved only by a horizontal forest of brightly coloured washing, hanging on lines suspended between the buildings. Many of the windows were broken or boarded up, and children scattered in the road as the bus clanked through.

Whenever we slowed children jumped on the running hoard and clung to the side, while the driver snarled at them.

The last of the children dropped away, tumbling in the roadside dust, when we reached a steel bridge thrown high over the gorge of the river. As we crossed I could see on the clean water below the other face of Muriseay Town: the white-painted yachts of visitors, the riverside cafés and bars, the chandlers' shops, the boutiques.

On the other side of the gorge the road turned sharply inland, following the course of the river to our right. I watched this view for some minutes, until Seri touched my arm to point out what could be seen through the other windows. Here a vast shanty town existed. Hundreds on thousands of makeshift dwellings had been thrown together out of every conceivable piece of waste material: corrugated iron, crates, auto tyres, beer barrels. Many of these mean houses were open to the sky, or sheltered beneath worn-out tarpaulins or plastic sheeting. None of the houses had windows, only crude holes, and very few of them had any kind of door. Adults and children squatted by the side of the road, watching with dull eyes as the bus went by. Rusty cars and old oil drums littered every flat space. Dogs ran wild everywhere.

I watched this sordid township with a feeling of vague but painful guilt, aware that Seri and I were the only two people 011 the bus dressed in new or clean clothes, that the other passengers probably recognized this as the "real" Muriseay, that they had 110 economic access either to my hotel or Seri's apartment. I recalled the ribbon development of luxury homes I had seen from the ship, and my thoughts about the glamorized image of the islands portrayed in the media.

I looked away, to my side of the bus, but now the road had wandered away from the river and the shanty town extended here too. I watched the tumbledown shacks as we passed and tried to imagine what it must he like to live there.

Would I even consider the Lotterie treatment, I wondered, if I lived in a place like that?

At last the bus left the township and entered open countryside. Fan ahead the mountains rose. Some of the parched land was being cultivated, but much of it lay empty.

We passed an airport on the right, surprising me. Air travel was supposed to be prohibited within the Archipelago, the airspace regulated by the Covenant of Neutrality. But to judge by the pylons of electronic sensors, and the ground-radar dishes, Muriseay Airport was as modern as any equivalent in the north. Approaching the terminal buildings I saw several large aircraft parked in the distance, but they were too far away for me to distinguish the markings.

"Is this a passenger airport?" I said quietly to Seri.

"No, purely military. Muriseay receives most of the troops from the north, but there are no camps here. The men are taken straight to ships, on the southern coast."

Some friends of mine in Jethra were associated with a civil rights group, concerned with monitoring the Covenant. According to them, many of the larger islands were the sites of military transit- and rest-camps. These were not strictly in breach of the Covenant, but represented one of its odder aspects. Such camps were used by both sides, and sometimes by both armies at once. However, I had seen no sign of them, and guessed they must be situated a long way from the roads or regular shipping lanes.

The bus halted outside the airport, and most of the passengers climbed out, clutching their bundles and parcels. Seri said they would be the civilian staff: caterers, cleaners, and so on. Soon after we set off again, the well-paved road we had been following gave out, and became a dusty, pot-holed track instead. From here, the rest of the journey was marked by the constant lurching of the bus, the roaring of the engine in low gear and occasional bangs from the suspension. And dust: the tyres threw up clouds of dust and grit which flew in the open windows, griming our clothes, marking the tiny lines of the face and gritting between the teeth.

Seri became talkative, and as the track rose into the foothills and the countryside became greener, she told me about some of the islands she had visited and things she had seen. I discovered a few more facts about her: she had worked on ships for some time, she had learned how to weave, she had been married for a brief period.

Now that we were in rising agricultural country, the bus made frequent stops to take on or let off passengers. At each of these stops people clustered around the bus, offering things for sale. Seri and I, marked out by our clothes, were the obvious focus of attention. Sometimes we bought fruit, and once we were served lukewarm black coffee from a chipped enamel bucket; by then I was so thirsty from the heat and dust that I easily overcame fastidiousness and drank from the one cup shared by everyone.

A few minutes later the bus broke down. The driver investigated, and steam burst forth from the radiator.

Seri was smiling.

"I take it this always happens?" I said.

"Yes, but not as soon as this. It normally boils when we start climbing."

After loud discussion with the passengers at the front, the driver set off back down the road towards the last village, accompanied by two of the men.

Unexpectedly, Seri slipped her hand into mine and leaned against me slightly. She squeezed my fingers.

"How much further are we going?" I said.

"We're nearly there. The next village."

"Couldn't we walk? I'd like to stretch my legs."

"Let's wait. He's only gone to get water. It doesn't look steep, but it's uphill all the way."

She closed her eyes, resting her head on my shoulder. I stared ahead, looking at the bulk of the mountains now rising directly before us. Although we had climbed a long way since leaving the town, the air was still warm and there was hardly any wind. Vineyards stretched on either side of the road. I could see tall cypresses in the distance, black against the sky. Seri dozed for a while, but I was getting stiff so I roused her. I climbed down from the bus and walked a distance up the road, relishing the exercise and the sunshine. It was not as humid here, the air smelt different. I walked as far as the crest of the rise the bus had been climbing when it broke down, and here I stopped and looked back. The plain stretched out before me, wavering in the thenmals, a fusion of greys and greens and ochnous yellows. In the distance, on the horizon, was the sea, but there was a haze and I could not see any other islands.

I sat down, and after a few minutes I saw Seri walking up the road to join me. As she sat down beside me she said: "The bus has broken down every time I've been on it."

"It doesn't matter. We're not in a hurry."

Again she slipped her hand into mine. "Why did you leave me there?"

I thought of excuses--fresh air, exercise, see the view--but changed my mind.

"I suppose I'm a bit shy of you," I said. "Last night, when you left me in the bar, I thought I'd made a mistake."

"I just had to see someone. A friend. I'd rather have been with you."

She was looking away, but she was holding my hand tightly.

Later, we saw the group of men returning to the bus with a can of water, so we walked down and took our seats again. In a few minutes the journey resumed, as dusty and lurching as before. Soon the road was rising through trees, turning into a pass in the mountains invisible from where we had halted. Tall eucalypts grew on each side of the track, the white bark peeling.

Above, a ceiling of blueish-green leaves, glimpses of sky; below, a twisting shallow river, seen fleetingly through the trees. The pass curved, and the road with it, and for a minute I saw a superb mountainscape, rocks and trees and broad shoulders of scree. Water tumbled down the face of the rocks, bouncing and spuming through the gum trees to the river below. The dusty plain around Muriseay Town was lost to sight.

Seri was staring through the open window as if it was the first time she too had been along this road. I began to sense the scale of these mountains; by Faiandland standards they were low and unspectacular, because the High Massif in the north of the country contained the grandest mountain scenery in the world. Here on Muriseay, scale and expectations were smaller, the effect more compact yet more startling. One could relate emotionally to this scenery: it was human-sized without being domestic.

"Do you like it?" Seri said.

"Yes, of course."

"We're almost there."

I looked ahead but could see only the track climbing through the trees into green penumbra.

Seri shouldered her bag and made her way up the aisle to the front of the bus. She spoke briefly to the driver. In a few moments we came to a part of the road where it opened out, and where two wooden benches had been built at the side. The bus halted, and we climbed down.

9

A path led down from the road, worn from the undergrowth to expose the soil. Stripped tree-branches had been laid in the ground at intervals to provide crude steps, and in the steepest places there was a handrail. We descended rapidly because the soil was dry and firm, and almost before the sound of the bus's engine had faded into the distance we saw the roofs of a village below us.

The path opened out on to a levelled area, where several cars were parked, and from here we came straight into the centre of the village. This was a pleasing double row of well-preserved old buildings. One or two had been converted to shops: there was a souvenir shop, a small restaurant and a garage. Because we were both hungry we went straight to the restaurant, and sat at one of the tables under the trees at the hack.

It was good to sit down without the intrusive racket of the bus, on the flying grit; we were in the shade, the river flowed at the end of the garden and high in the trees overhead were birds invisible to us, making a strange and abrupt bell-like call. The meal was a dish called valti. Native to Muriseay it was a colourful mixture of rice, beans, tomatoes and meat, served in a spicy saffron-coloured sauce. Seri and I spoke little, but we had become detectably closer to each other.

Afterwards, we walked through the village until we came to the river.

Here, a broad lawn had been laid and a number of people were sitting around, relaxing in the shade of the trees. It was a peaceful place, made oddly more silent by the river sounds and the birdsong. A wooden bridge, rustic but solid, led across to the other side where another path climbed erratically through the trees. There was a great stillness to the air, and the smell of the eucalypts, reminding me obscurely of childhood medicines, hung thick in the warm day. Below, we could hear the river on the stones.

We had not climbed far when we came to a single-bar gate across the path. Seri slipped two coins into a box, and we went through. Beyond the gate the path went more steeply up the hillside, leading to a narrow cleft in the rock. We clambered through, and I saw that the corners and angles of the rock had been worn smooth by feet. Now the path went down, while the walls of rock steepened above us. A few small trees and bushes grew on the ground beside us, but the rock was bare, crowned with foliage, darkening the vale.

Three people were walking hack along the path towards us, but they passed without saying anything. It was oppressively quiet in the tiny valley, and the few things Seri and I said to each other were in hushed voices. It was the same sort of quietude adopted by non-believers who visit a church; here in the mountains the same serene stasis existed.

I heard the sound of water, and as the path turned towards the tallest face of rock I saw the pool.

There was a spring in the rock, flowing across a flat surface, and trickling out over the edge were a number of tiny waterfalls. They poured down into the dank pool below, making a sonorous dripping noise, amplified into a hollow echoing by the concave wall of rock behind. The pool itself was black, with an illusion of greenness from the overhanging shrubbery. Its surface trembled continuously, while the unceasing water fell from above.

Although the air in the valley was as warm as elsewhere, there was a chill quality given by the sound of the water. Unaccountably, I felt myself shiver, the nervous tic that brings an unexplained shudder, the feeling that is said to be like someone walking over your grave. The pool was beautiful in a simple way, but it had a presence I could not like. It was cluttered with incongruity.

Hanging from the lip of the water shelf was a bizarre array of household items. There, in the flow of water, someone had dangled an old shoe. Next to it swung a child's knitted jacket, bobbing as the water turned it. Then there was a pair of sandals, a wooden matchbox, a ball of string, a raffia basket, a necktie, a glove. They had a faint sheen of greyness, unclearly seen as the water poured over and through them.

This juxtaposition had an eerie, unexplained quality to it, like a sheep's heart nailed to a door, a token of ritual magic.

Seri said: "They're petrifying, turning to stone."

"Not literally."

"No . . . but there's something in the water. Silica, I think. Anything hung in the water builds up a coating."

"But why should anyone want a stone shoe?"

"That's the people who run the souvenir shop. They put most of the stuff here, although anyone can leave something. The people in the shop say it will bring you luck. It's just a novelty, really."

"Is this what you brought me to see?" I said.

"Yes."

"Why, Seri?"

"I'm not sure. I thought you'd like it here."

We sat down together on the grass, regarding the petrifying pool and its motley of domestic fetishes. While we were there, more people walked through the vale and visited the pool. They were in a group of about ten, with children running around and making a noise. They made much of the objects dangling in the falls, and one of the men was photographed leaning out over the pool with his hand in the trickling water. Afterwards, as they walked away, he was still pretending his hand had been turned to stone, as he wielded it like a rigid claw.

I wondered what would happen if something living really was laid out beneath the falling water. Would it too acquire a veneer of stone, or would skin reject it? Obviously a human being or an animal would simply not keep still or stay long enough. A corpse, though, could probably turn to stone; organic death to inorganic permanence.

With such distracting macabre thoughts I sat silently with Seri while the birds made their strange noise overhead. It was still warm, but I noticed a gradual reduction in the intensity of sunlight on the trees above us. I was unused to being so far south as this, and the sudden twilights still surprised me.

"What time does it get dark?" I said.

Seri glanced at her wristwatch. "Not long. We ought to get back up to the road. There's a bus in about half an hour."

"If it hasn't broken down again."

"That's if it has," she said with a wry smile. We walked up through the little valley, then along the path to the bridge over the river. Lights were coming on in the village as we passed through, and by the time we had clambered up to the road it was almost dark. We sat down on one of the benches and listened to the evening sounds. Cicadas scraped for a while, but then there was a brief and lovely burst of hirdsong, like the dawn chorus in the Faiandland countryside, transformed in the tropics. Below us, we heard music from the village, and the shallow river.

As the dark became absolute, the physical tension we had both been suppressing suddenly was released. Without either of us initiating it, or so it seemed, we were kissing passionately, leaving no doubts. But in a while, Seri drew back from me and said: "The bus won't be coming now. It's too late.

Nothing's allowed on the road past the airport after dark."

I said: "You knew that before we came here."

"Well, yes." She kissed me.

"Can we stay somewhere in the village?"

"I think I know a place."

We went slowly down the wooded path, stumbling on the steps, heading down to the village lights we could just see through the trees. Seri led me to a house set back slightly from the road, and spoke in patois to the woman who came to the door. Money changed hands, and we were taken up to a room tucked under the roof: black-painted wooden rafters sloped over the bed. We had said nothing on the way, suspending it all, but as soon as we were alone, Seri slipped out of her clothes and lay on the bed. I quickly joined her.

An hour or two later, drained of the tension but still not really knowing each other, we dressed and went across to the restaurant. There were no other visitors in the village, and the owner had closed for the night.

Again, Seri spoke persuasively in patois, and gave the man some money. After a delay we were brought a simple meal of bacon and beans, served in rice.

I said, while we were eating: "I must give you some money."

"Why? I can get all this back from the Lotterie."

Under the table our knees were touching, hers slightly gripping mine. I said: "Do I have to give you back to the Lotterie?"

She shook her head. "I'm thinking of quitting the job. It's time I changed islands."

"Why?"

"I've been on Muriseay long enough. I want to find somewhere quieter."

"Is that the only reason?"

"Part of it. I don't get on too well with the manager in the office. And the job's not quite what I expected."

"What do you mean?"

"It doesn't matter. I'll tell you sometime."

We did not want to return to the room immediately, so we walked up and down the village street, our arms around each other. It was getting cool.

We stopped by the souvenir shop and looked in at the lighted window display. It was full of petrified objects, bizarre and rnundane at once.

Walking again, I said: "Tell me why you want to quit the job."

"I thought I did."

"You said it wasn't what you expected."

Seri said nothing at first. We crossed the wide lawn by the river, and stood on the bridge. We could hear the myrtaceous trees moving in the breeze.

At last Seri said: "I can't make up my mind about the prize. I'm full of contradictions about it. In the job I've got to help people, and encourage them to go on to the clinic and receive the treatment."

"Do many of them need encouragement?" I said, thinking of course of my own doubts.

"No. A few are worried in case it's dangerous. They just need someone to tell them it isn't. But you see, everything I do is based on the assumption that the Lotterie is a good thing. I'm just not sure any more that it is."

"Why?"

"Well, for one thing, you're the youngest winner I've ever seen.

Everyone else is at least forty or fifty, and some of them are extremely old.

What it seems to mean is that the majority of people who buy the tickets are the same age. If you think about it, that means the Lotterie is just exploiting people's fear of dying."

"That's understandable," I said. "And surely athanasia itself was developed because of the same fear?"

"Yes . . . but the lottery system seems so indiscriminate. When I first started the job I thought the treatment should only go to people who are ill.

Then I saw some of the mail we get. Every day, the office receives hundreds of letters from people in hospital, pleading for the treatment. The clinic simply couldn't cope with even a fraction of them."

"What do you do about the letters?"

"You'll hate the answer."

"Go on."

"We send them a form letter, and a complimentary ticket for the next draw. And we only send a ticket if they write from a hospital for incurable diseases."

"That must bring them comfort," I said.

"I don't like it any more than you do. No one at the office likes it.

Eventually, I began to understand why it was necessary. Suppose we gave the treatment to anyone with cancer. Why is someone deserving of athanasia just because they're ill? Thieves and swindlers and rapists get cancer just like anyone else."

"But it would be humanitarian," I said, thinking that thieves and rapists can also win lotteries.

"It's unworkable, Peter. There's a booklet in the office. I'll let you read it if you want to. It's the Lotterie's argument against treating the sick. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of people suffering from cancer.

The clinic can't treat them all. The treatment's too expensive, and it's too slow. So they would have to he selective. They would have to go through case histories, look for people they consider deserving, narrow it down to a few hundred a year. And _who_ sits in judgement? Who can decide that one person deserves to live while another deserves to die? It might conceivably work for a short time . . . but then there would be someone denied the treatment, someone in power or someone in the media. Perhaps they'd be given the treatment to keep them quiet, and at once the system is corrupted."

I felt the skin on Seri's arm as she pressed a hand on mine. She was cold, like me, so we started walking back towards the house. The mountains loomed black around us; everything was silent.

"You've talked me out of going to the clinic," I said. "I don't want anything more to do with this."

"I think you should."

"But why?"

"I told you I was full of contradictions." She was shivering. "Let's go inside and I'll tell you."

In the house the upstairs room felt as if it had been heated, after the unexpected freshness of the night mountain air. I touched one of the overhead beams, and it was still warm from the day's sun.

We sat down on the edge of the bed, side by side, very chaste. Seri took my hand, teasing the palm with her fingers.

She said: "You've got to have the treatment because the lottery is run fairly, and the lottery is the only defence against corruption. Before I got the job I used to hear the stories. You know, the ones we've all heard, about people buying their way in. The first thing they tell you when you start the job is that this isn't true. They show you what they call the proof . . . the total amount of drugs they can synthesize in a year, the maximum capacity of the equipment. It tallies exactly with the number of prize-winners every year.

They're very defensive about it, to the point where you suspect they're covering something up."

"Are they?"

"They _must_ be, Peter. What about Mankinova?"

Yosep Mankinova was the former prime minister of Bagonne, a country in the north with supposed non-aligned status. Because of its strategic importance--oil reserves, plus a geographical location commanding crucial sea-lanes--Bagonne exercised political and economic influence out of all proportion to its size. Mankinova, an extreme right-wing politician, had governed Bagonne in the years leading up to the war, but about twenty-five years ago had been forced to resign when evidence was found that he had corruptly received the athanasia treatment. No final proof was established.

Lotterie-Collago had emphatically denied it, but shortly afterwards two of the investigating journalists died in mysterious circumstances. Events moved on, the scandal faded and Mankinova went into obscurity. But recently, a few months before I left Jethra, the story had been revived. A number of photographs appeared in newspapers, alleged to be of Mankinova. If this was so, they revealed that he looked no older than he had been at the time of his resignation. He was a man in his eighties who looked like a man in his fifties.

I said: "It would be naïve to think that that sort of thing doesn't happen."

"I'm not naïve. But the number of people they can treat is limited, and anyone who wins the prize and then turns it down simply makes it possible."

"Now you're supposing that I deserve to live, and someone else doesn't."

"No . . . that's already been decided by the computer. You're just a random winner. That's why you must go on."

I stared at the threadbare carpet, thinking that everything she said only deepened my doubts. I was of course tempted by the idea of living a long and healthy life, and the notion of refusing it was one which would require a strength I had never before possessed. I was not a Deloinne, highly principled, austerely moralistic. I was greedy for life, greedy even for living, as Deloinne had put it, and a part of me could never deny this. But it continued to feel wrong, in a way I understood only vaguely. It was not for me.

And I thought of Seri. So far we were casual lovers, two people who had recently met, who had already made love and who probably would again, yet who had no emotional commitment to each other. It was possible the relationship would develop, that we would continue to know each other, perhaps fall in love in the conventional sense. I tried to imagine what would happen if I took the treatment while she did not. She, or anyone I might become involved with, would grow steadily older and I would not. My friends, my family, would move on into biological future, while I would be fixed, or petrified.

Seri left the bed, stripped off her shirt and ran water for washing into the basin. I watched her curved back as she leaned down to wash her face and arms. She had a slim, ordinary body, very compact and supple. Bending down she looked at me around her shoulder, smiling invertedly.

"You're staring," she said.

"Why not?"

But I was only looking abstractedly. I was thinking about what decision, if any, I should make. I supposed that it was conflict between mind and heart.

If I followed my instincts, my selfish greed, I should abandon my doubts and travel to Collago and become an athanasian; if I listened to my thoughts, I should not.

When we were in bed we made love again, less urgently than the first time but with an affection that had not been there before. I was wide awake afterwards, and I lay back in the crumpled sheets staring at the ceiling. Seri lay curled in my arm, her head against my neck, a hand lying on my chest.

"Are you going to go to Collago?" she said.

"I don't know yet."

"If you do, I'll go with you."

"Why?"

"I want to be with you. I told you, I'm quitting my job."

"I'd like that," I said.

"I want to be sure--"

"That I'll go through with it?"

"No . . . that if you do, then afterwards you'll be all right. I can't say why." She moved suddenly, resting on an elbow and looking down at me.

"Peter, there's something about the treatment I don't like. It frightens me."

"Is it dangerous?"

"No, not dangerous. There's no risk. It's what happens afterwards. I'm not supposed to tell you."

"But you will," I said.

"Yes." She kissed me briefly. "When you get to the clinic there are a few preliminaries. One of them is a complete medical check-over. Another is, you have to answer a questionnaire. It's one of the conditions. In the office we call it the longest form in the world. It asks you everything about yourself."

"I have to write my autobiography."

"That's what it amounts to, yes."

"They told me this in Jethra," I said. "They didn't say it was a questionnaire, but that before the treatment I would have to write a complete account of myself."

"Did they tell you why?"

"No. I just assumed it was part of the treatment."

"It's nothing to do with the treatment itself. It's used in the rehabilitation afterwards. What they do to you, to make you athanasian, is clean out your system. They renew your body, but they wipe your mind. You'll be amnesiac afterwards."

I said nothing, looking back into her earnest eyes.

She said: "The questionnaire becomes the basis for your new life. You become what you wrote. Doesn't that scare you?"

I remembered the long months in Golan's villa in the hills near Jethra, my quest to tell the truth, the various devices I had used to discover that truth, the certainty that I had succeeded, and, finally, the sense of renewal I had felt when I finished. That manuscript, presently lying in my hotel room in Muriseay Town, contained my life as surely as words contained meaning. I had already become what I had written. I was _defined_ by my work.

I said: "No, it doesn't scare me."

"It does me. That's why I want to be there with you. I don't believe what they claim, that the patients recover their identities."

I hugged her, and although she resisted at first she soon relaxed and lay down beside me again.

"I haven't made up my mind yet. But I think I'll go to the island, and decide when I'm there."

Seri said nothing, holding herself against me.

"I've got to find out for myself," I said.

Her face buried in my side, Seri said: "Can I come with you?"

"Yes, of course."

"Talk to me, Peter. While we travel, tell me who you are. I want to know you."

We drifted off into sleep soon after that. During the night I dreamed I was hanging on a rope beneath a waterfall, spinning and bobbing in the relentless torrent. Gradually my limbs became stiffer and my mind became frozen, until I shifted in my sleep and the dream died.

10

It was raining in Sheffield. I had been given the small front bedroom in Felicity's house, and when I was there I could be alone. I would sometimes stand for hours at the window looking across the roofs at the industrial scenery beyond. Sheffield was an ugly, functional city, fallen from its great days of steelworking, now an untidy urban mess that flowed up to the Pennine Hills in the west and blended under the arches of the motorway viaduct with the smaller town of Rotherham to the east. It was on this side of Sheffield that Felicity and James had their house.

Greenway Park was an island of clean middle-class houses and gardens, surrounded by the older and gloomier suburbs of the city. In the centre of the estate the planners had left an open space of about half an acre, in which young saplings had been planted, and into which the residents took their dogs to defecate. Felicity and James had a dog, and his name was Jasper or Jasperboy, depending.

From the moment I arrived at the house, I entered a complicated, withdrawn state of mind. I acknowledged that Felicity was doing me a favour, that I had made a mess of my life in Edwin's cottage, that the time had come for a form of recuperation, and so I became submissive and compliant. I knew that my obsessive interest in my manuscript was responsible for my errors, so I tried to put it out of my mind. At the same time, I continued in the belief that the work I had been doing was crucial to my sense of identity, and that Felicity had dragged me away from it. I was therefore deeply resentful and angry, and I withdrew from her.

I became detached from life in her house, and was obsessed with trivia.

I could not help but notice everything. I was critical of the house, their habits, their attitudes. I disliked their friends. I felt suffocated by their closeness, their normality. I watched the way James ate, the fact that he had a little paunch, that he went jogging. I noted the television programmes they watched, the sort of food Felicity cooked, the things they said to their children. These two, Alan and Tarnsin, were for a time allies, because I too was treated like a child.

I suppressed my feelings. I tried to join in with their life, to show the gratitude that I knew I ought to feel, but Felicity and I had simply grown apart. Everything about her life grated on me.

Many weeks went by. Autumn passed and winter came; Christmas was a brief respite because the children became more important than me. But in general we were irritants for each other.

On alternate weekends all five of us would drive down in James's Volvo to the house in Herefordshire. These were expeditions I dreaded, although Felicity and James seemed to look forward to them. It gave the children a taste for the countryside, Felicity said, and Jasper-boy enjoyed the exercise.

The house was shaping up well, James said, and often telephoned Edwin and Marge to give them what he called progress reports. I was always made to work in the garden, clearing the tangle of overgrown shrubs and making them into compost. James and Felicity and the children concentrated on the decorating. My white room, still intact until these visits, was the first to be done: magnolia emulsion made a tasteful background for the curtain material Marge had described on the phone to Felicity. James hired local electricians and plasterers, and soon the simple cottage was turned into just what Edwin and Marge wanted.

Felicity helped me in the garden one weekend, and while I was on the other side of the house she uprooted the honeysuckle and dumped it on the huge new heap that would one day decay into garden compost.

I said: "That was a honeysuckle."

"It was dead, whatever it was."

"Plants lose their leaves in winter," I said. "It's called nature."

"Then that proves it wasn't a honeysuckle, because they're evergreen."

I rescued the plant from the heap, and stuck its roots back in the soil, but when we returned two weeks later it had mysteriously vanished. I was extremely saddened by this vandalism, because the honeysuckle was something I had loved. I remembered those evening scents while I was writing in my white room, and it was this incident that at last returned me to my manuscript. As soon as we were back in Greenway Park I took it from my holdall where I kept it hidden, and started to read through it.

I had difficulty with it at first, because I was disappointed with what I found. It was as if, during the weeks I had been away from it, the words had decayed or diminished. What I found seemed like a synopsis for the real thing.

Later pages were better, but I was unhappy.

I knew I ought to go through the manuscript yet again, but something held me back. I shrank away from the prospect of renewing Felicity's interest in what I had been writing; while the manuscript was hidden in my bag I could forget it, and so could Felicity. Everyone said how well I was doing.

The manuscript was a reminder of my past, what I might have been. It was dangerous to me; it excited me and seduced me, charged me with imagination, but the reality of it was a disappointment.

So I stared at the unsatisfactory pages spread on the table in my room, and for a while I stood at the window and looked across the city at the distant Pennines, and then at last I bulked the pages and squared them off and returned them to the holdall. Afterwards, I stood by the window for the rest of the afternoon, playing idly with the macrame plant holder that hung from the ceiling, and watched the city lights come on as the Pennines receded into the mist.

With the coming of the New Year the weather deteriorated, and so too did the atmosphere in the house. The children no longer wanted to play with me, and although James remained superficially friendly to me, Felicity became almost overtly hostile. She served my food at mealtimes in a glaring silence, and if I offered to help around the house I was told to keep out of the way. I spent more and more time in my room, standing by the window and looking at the snow on the distant hills.

The Pennine Chain had always been an important part of my mental environment. Childhood in the Manchester suburb: safe houses and streets with neighbours and gardens, school close at hand, but always a few miles to the east, dark and undulating and wild, the Pennine Hills. Now I was to the other side of them but the hills were the same: a barren wilderness bisecting England. It seemed to me they were a symbol of neutrality, a balance, dividing my past life from my present. Perhaps there, in the steep curving valleys between the limestone moors, was some more abstract clue to where I had failed in my life. Living on a small island like Britain, modern and civilized, one felt the elements less. There were just the sea and the hills, and in Sheffield the hills were nearer. I needed something elemental to clarify me.

One day, following an idea, I asked the children if they had ever been to the caves in Castleton, deep in the Pennines. Before long they were pestering their parents to take them to see the Bottomless Pit, the Blue John Caves, the pool which could turn things to stone.

Felicity said to me: "Have you put them up to this, Peter?"

"It would be nice to go up in the hills."

"James won't drive up there in the snow."

Fortunately, the weather changed soon after this, and a spell of warm wind and rain melted the snow and once again sharpened the dark silhouette of the Pennines. For a few days it looked as if the children had forgotten my idea, but then, entirely without my prompting, Alan brought up the subject again. Felicity said she would see, frowned at me and changed the subject.

I turned again to my manuscript, feeling that something was beginning to move in me.

I made a resolution that this time I would read it through to the end, suppressing criticism. I wanted to discover _what_ I had written, not how I had written. Only then would I decide whether another draft should be undertaken.

Stylistically, the early pages were the worst, but as soon as I was past them I found it easy to read. My strongest impression was an odd one: that I was not so much reading as recalling. I was still virtually word-perfect, and I felt that all I had to do was hold the pages in my hand and turn them one by one, and the story would spring spontaneously to mind.

I had always believed that I had put the essence of myself into the pages, and now that I was again in touch with the preoccupation of the long summer I experienced the most extraordinary feeling of security and reassurance. It was as if I had wandered away from myself, but now I was returning. I felt confident, sane, outward-looking and energetic.

Downstairs, while I read, James was putting up some bookshelves, even though the house was almost devoid of books. Felicity had some pot plants and ornaments that needed a place. The sound of the electric drill interrupted the reading, like incorrect punctuation.

I had taken my work for granted. During the weeks I had been languishing in Felicity's house I had neglected my identity. Here, in the pages, was all I had missed. I was in contact with myself again.

Certain passages were astonishingly acute in their observation. There was a roundness to the ideas, a consistency to the whole. With each revelation I felt my confidence return. I started to live again, as once before I had lived vicariously through my writing. I recognized the truths, as once I had created them. Above all, I identified strongly with the fictions I had devised and the landscape in which they were set.

Felicity, in real life changed beyond recognition by her children, her husband, her attitudes, became explicable to me as "Kalia". James featured, in shadow, as "Yallow". Gracia was "Seri". I lived again in the city of Jethra, by the sea, overlooking islands. I sat at my table by the window in Felicity's house, staring across Sheffield at the bleak moors beyond, as in the closing passages of the manuscript I stood on a rise in Jethra's Seigniory Park, staring across the roofs at the sea.

Those islands of the Archipelago were as the Pennine Hills: neutral territory, a place to wander, a division between past and present, a way of escape.

I read the manuscript through to the end, to that last unfinished sentence, then went downstairs to help James with his carpentry. My mood was good and we all responded. Later, before the children went to bed, Felicity suggested we could all visit Castleton at the weekend; it would make a nice day out.

I remained in high spirits until the day. Felicity packed a picnic lunch in the morning, saying that if it rained we could eat in the car, but there was a picnic area just outside the village. I anticipated freedom, a lack of direction, a wandering. James drove the Volvo through the crowded centre of Sheffield, then headed up into the Pennines, following the road to Chapel-en-le-Frith, climbing past sodden green hill pasture and by scree slopes of fallen limestone. The wind buffeted the car, exhilarating me. These were the horizon hills, the distant shapes that had always been on the margin of my life. I sat in the centre of the back seat, between Alan and Tamsin, listening to Felicity. The dog was crouched in the baggage space behind.

We parked in a small open space on the edge of Castleton village, and we all climbed out. The wind blustered around us, spotting us with rain. The children burrowed deeper into their weatherproof anoraks, and Tamsin said she wanted to go to the lavatory. James locked the car, and tested the handles.

I said: "I think I'll go for a walk by myself."

"Don't forget lunch. We're going to look at the caves."

They headed off, content to he without me. James had a walking stick, and Jasper bounded around him.

Alone, I stood with my hands deep in my pockets, looking around for a walk to take. There was only one other car in the park: a green Triumph Herald, spotted with rust. The woman sitting behind the wheel had been regarding me, and now she opened the door and stood where I could see her.

"Hello, Peter," she said, and at last I recognized her.

11

Dark hair, dark eyes; these I noticed at once. The wind took her hair back from her face, exposing the rather wide forehead, the eyes sunk beneath.

Gracia had always been too thin, and the wind was not flattering her. She had her old fur coat on, the one we had bought from a stall in Camden Lock one Saturday afternoon in summer, the one with the torn lining and the rents beneath the sleeves. This had never buttoned, and she held it closed in front of her by keeping her hands in the pockets. Yet she stood erect, letting me see her, letting the wind knock her. She was as she had ever been: tall, angular of face, untidy and casual, unsuited to open air or countryside, more at home in London flats and streets, the basements of cities. There she blended, here she was incongruous. Gypsy blood, she once had told me, but she rarely left London, she had never known the road.

I went across to her, surprised as much by how familiar she looked as by the fact she was there. I was not thinking, only noticing. There was an awkward moment, when we stood facing each other by her car, neither of us saying anything, then spontaneously we moved quickly and put our arms around one another. We held tight, pressing our faces together without kissing; her cheeks were cold, and the fur of the coat was damp. I felt a surge of relief and happiness, a marvelling that she was safe and we were together again. I held on and held on, unwilling to let the reality of her frail body go, and soon I was crying with her. Gracia had never made me cry, nor I her. VVe had been sophisticates in London, whatever that meant, although at the end, in the months before we parted, there had been a tautness in us that was just a suppression of emotion. Our coolness to each other had become a habit, a mannerism that became self-generating. We had known each other too long to break out of patterns.