The Glamour

I

Three weeks after returning to London, Richard Grey was offered filming work in Liverpool. It was to be a fourday assignment, operating the camera for a television documentary about urban renewal in the wake of the Toxteth riots. It would be physically demanding on him, but the unit would be working with full union crew, including camera assistants, and after an hour’s indecision he accepted. He caught the train to Liverpool the following day.

It temporarily solved the problem of what to do. He felt frustrated by the continuing stiffness in his body, and was restless to be working again. Anyway, his money was at last beginning to run low. There was talk of compensation being paid by the Home Office, and correspondence was going to and fro between a solicitor and his MP, but it was not something he was counting on.

Until the film work came along, Grey had been hobbling through his life, learning again how to go shopping, to the movies, to the pub. Everything had to be taken slowly. Once a week he went to the physiotherapy department at Whittington Hospital to be manipulated and exercised; he was improving, but it was very gradual. He walked as much as he could, because although immediately afterward he felt tired and uncomfortable, the longterm effect was a steady easing of his left hip. The stairs outside his apartment were a constant obstacle, but he found he could manage. Driving was difficult, because using the clutch pedal put a strain on his hip. What he needed was a car with automatic transmission, but this would have to wait until more money arrived.

Leaving London would mean a break from Sue, something which a few weeks before he would never have dreamed he wanted, but which now seemed essential. He had to have time away from her to think about other things, clear his mind a little.

Grey wished fervently that she had turned out to be in reality what she had appeared to be at first: a girlfriend from his lost weeks with whom a relationship could be continued, renewed by the freshness of rediscovery. When he first met her he had found her oddness intriguing and winsome, hinting at layers of buried complexity which patience would release.

He still found her physically attractive, she interested him, and great tenderness existed. As his body healed, their physical relationship became more exciting and satisfying. But the difference was that she said she loved him, whereas in his innermost self Grey knew he did not feel the same. He liked her and he wanted to know her better and more intimately, but he did not love her. He was emotionally dependent on her, missed her when they were apart, felt protective of her, but still he did not love her.

The problem was their past together.

He did not feel about it. Memories of sorts now came from his lost weeks, but they were fragmentary and disconcerting, appearing from some subconscious or nearconscious level of his mind.

Real memories are a muddle of overlooked experience; odd and irrelevant facts lurk in the mind, stubbornly unforgotten after a period of years; snatches of forgotten tunes appear unsummoned in the head; strange associations exist—a smell will evoke a particular event, a color will be an inexplicable reminder of a place visited long ago. Grey had such normal memory capabilities concerning most of his past life, but his amnesiac period was still closed to him.

What memories he had of that time came to him with a superficial accuracy that he sensed was unreliable. His mind told him stories, gave him anecdotes and sequences that had a shallow plausibility. The analogy he made for it was a film that had been edited, so that narrative continuity was already there.

The rest of his memories, his old life, were like uncut rushes, unsorted, unassembled, hanging around in the can of his mind for order to be edited into them.

He now recognized that his memories of France were mostly false, projected onto his mind from some quirk of the unconscious. He knew he had not been to France—or not, at least, at the time he remembered. Some parts of the story were true: he had met Sue, there was the business with Niall, there had been a holiday together, he had been filming in Central America, there had been a final row.

But then there was Sue’s account of their past together, and here the real gap appeared.

While she indirectly confirmed his edited memories, her story was something he had only heard. He could accept what she said in the way he might read and accept something in a book or a newspaper. She obviously believed that once she told her story some buried unconscious memory would be triggered, and his real memories of the same incidents would leap into his mind. He had wanted to believe that too, and throughout had waited for something he could identify, a resonant image, some moment of psychological conviction opening the way to the rest. It had not come. Her story remained a story, and it was as yet remote from him.

If anything, it had deepened the problem of his forgotten period. She had in a sense shown him another edited film, ready-made, complete in itself.

The muddle of reality still eluded him.

His present misgivings, though, centered on two other areas. There was Sue’s emphasis on her claims to invisibility, and her obsessive and destructive relationship with Niall.

Once before in his life Grey had been briefly involved in a triangular situation. Although he had genuinely cared for the woman at the center of that, and had tried not to put pressure on her, the constant indecision, the to-ings and fro-ings of loyalty and his own unavoidable feelings of sexual jealousy had ultimately poisoned the affair. He had sworn afterward never again to get involved with someone leading a double life, yet this was exactly what he appeared to have done with Sue. Something very powerful must have drawn him to her.

Sue said that Niall was no longer bothering her, and that she had not seen him since the day he gave her the copy of The Times. It certainly appeared to be true that there was no one else in her life at the moment.

Niall remained a factor, though.

It was as if she was holding something in reserve about him, as if, should he suddenly reappear, he would again demand a place in her life. Niall had become a subject neither of them raised, and by not being discussed he remained distant but omnipresent.

Invisibility deepened the division.

Grey was a practical man, trained to use eye and hand. His vocation was with visual images, lit and seen and photographed. What he saw he believed in; what he did not see was not there.

Listening to Sue’s account of her life, he thought at first that her endless talk of invisible people was allegorical in some way, a description of an attitude to life. Maybe this was so, but he knew she also meant it literally and physically. She maintained that some people could escape being seen through the failure of others to notice them. That he, Grey himself, was of the same condition was frankly incredible to him.

Yet Sue’s account of this was that she had awakened him to it, that she had demonstrated to him the talent he had. Now, she claimed, it was latent in him again, shocked out of him by the assault of his injuries. If he remembered how, she said, he would rediscover it.

Listening to her, the doubts she frequently expressed, the talk of madness and delusion, he wondered if the explanation lay there. The sheer obsession of Sue’s insistence was itself close to delusion—a mad jargon, the desperation of persistent but illogical belief.

His was the sort of mind that demanded proof, and, failing that, evidence. It seemed to him that it would be simple to settle the matter one way or another, but Sue was maddeningly imprecise. Invisible people were there, they could be seen, but unless you knew how to see they would not be noticed.

They went out one day to Kensington High Street, mingling with the crowds of shoppers on a busy afternoon. Sue pointed out a number of people, claiming that they were invisibles. Sometimes Grey could see who she meant, sometimes he could not. He photographed them all. The results were inconclusive: when the prints came back from the processor, the crowds were just crowds, and he and Sue could only argue whether this person had been visible at the time, or that couple was invisible.

“Make yourself invisible,” Grey said. “Do it now, while I watch.”

“I can’t.”

“But you said you could.”

“It’s different now. It’s not easy for me anymore.”

“You can still do it, though.”

“Yes, but you know how to see me.”

Nevertheless, she tried. After much frowning and concentration she declared herself to be invisible, but as far as Grey was concerned she was still there, noticed in the room. She accused him of disbelieving her, but it was not as straightforward as that. He believed, for instance, in the fact of her appearance.

She had always attracted him with the neutrality of the way she looked. Everything about her was plain: her skin was fair, her hair was light brown, her eyes were hazel, her features were regular, her figure was slim. She was of average height, and her clothes sat naturally on her body. When she moved, she did so quietly. Her voice was pleasant but unremarkable. A disinterested glance at her might dismiss her as dull and mousy, but to Grey, interested in her and involved with her, she was unusually attractive. What he perceived in her was hidden by the plainness of the surface; something electric came from within. When they were together he was always wanting to touch her. He liked the way her face changed when she smiled, or was preoccupied. When they made love he felt that their bodies blended without touching, an imprecise sensation that he experienced every time but which he could never define. It was as if she were a complement to him, someone who responded to his immediate needs.

She claimed that by disbelieving her invisibility he was rejecting everything she had told him, but in fact this concealed quality of her intrigued him.

She was not invisible to him, or not in any way he understood the word, but she was for all that an inexact person. This did persuade him that her claims had an inner truth, and he believed he was a long way from rejecting her.

Even so, the trip to Liverpool gave him the opportunity to reflect.

II

The sea could always be felt in Liverpool; the great riverfront with the view across to Birkenhead, the glimpse of the Irish Sea to the west, the self-confident architecture of the Victorian shipping offices, the smell of water on the gusting wind. Away from the center, but not far away, where the buildings were meaner and the streets were narrower, the sea evidenced itself differently: a grim redlight district of slum houses, empty warehouses where bonded goods had once been stored, pubs with maritime names, cleared areas fronted with advertising posters selling Jamaican rum and airlines to America.

Here was Toxteth, where belated government intervention was trying to impose community spirit on a place where transience had always been the norm.

It was good to be working with an Arriflex again, feeling its lumpy weight on his shoulder, the molded eyepiece against his brow. Grey greeted the workaday camera with a sense of quiet reunion, amazed to discover how natural it still felt in his hands, how his vision was narrowed and sharpened by seeing and thinking through the viewfinder. But he was used to working with a smaller crew, and the large number of people around him disconcerted him at first. He felt he was on trial, that they were waiting to see if he still knew what to do, but within a short time of starting he realized that these were his own fears and everyone else was too busy with his own job to be thinking about him.

He settled to the work, glad to be doing again what he was best at. The first day’s shooting exhausted him because he was out of practice in other ways, and the morning of the second day his leg and shoulders were painful. The work absorbed him, though, and he knew that these few days were worth a hundred hours of physiotherapy.

The director was an experienced documentary maker, and they kept easily to the schedule. They were always finished with filming by late afternoon, leaving the evenings free. The crew were staying at the Adelphi Hotel, a glorious Victorian extravaganza in the center of the city, and each evening most of the people stayed in to drink in the large palm-filled mezzanine bar. For Grey it was an opportunity to talk shop, swap stories about old assignments, catch up on gossip about people he knew. There was talk of more jobs coming up, a chance to work on contract in Saudi Arabia, a story developing in Italy.

It was all radically different from the last few weeks when he had been obsessed with himself and Sue, her bizarre story and claustrophobic relationships. He telephoned her from his room one evening, and hearing her voice, thin and faint down the trunk line, gave him the sense of drilling a long tunnel back to something he had already left behind. She said she was lonely without him … wanted him back with her quickly … sorry about everything … different now. He uttered reassurances, feeling glib, trying to make them sincere. He still wanted her, yearned for lovemaking with her, but while he was away it all felt as different as she said.

They shot the last footage on the fourth evening. The location was a workingmen’s club, a smoky barn loud with music and raised voices. Grey arrived early with his assistants and set up the lights for the interviews, widened a few gangways for the camera to dolly along. To one side there was a small platform with a number of spotlights, musical amplifiers stacked unused under covers at the back. The acoustics were bright, and the soundman winced at the amount of echo when he took a level. Most of the club members were men, wearing suits without neckties, and the few women kept their outdoor coats on. Everyone drank from straight glasses, talking noisily over the recorded band music coming from the loudspeakers. As the place filled up and the bouncers took up their positions by the bar and the door, Grey was reminded of a pub in Northern Ireland where he had been filming a few years before. That had had the same spartan decor: plain tables and chairs, bare floorboards, beer-mats and ashtrays from breweries, overhead lights with cheap lampshades, the bar itself lit by fluorescent tubes.

They started filming: a few establishing shots of the crowded room, close-ups on a few drinkers, and then a number of interviews: how many people were unemployed, what life was like, prospects of moving away, a works closure impending.

The main entertainment of the evening was a stripper, who came onto the platform wearing a gaudy sequined outfit that had obviously seen much use. Grey took the camera on his shoulder and moved in to film her act. Seeing the camera, the woman put on an elaborate show, grimacing sexily, grinding her backside, stripping off her costume with exaggerated gestures. She looked to be in her middle thirties—overweight, with a bad complexion under her makeup, stretch marks on her belly, and pendulous breasts. When she was naked she jumped down from the platform. Grey followed her with the camera as she went from table to table sitting on laps, spreading her legs, letting her breasts be fingered, a look of grim gaiety on her face.

When she had gone and the camera was being reinstalled on the dolly, Grey stood to one side, remembering.

There had been a stripper in that bar in Belfast. He and the soundman had gone there in the middle of the evening, after a sectarian shooting had taken place. They arrived just as the ambulances and police were leaving, and all there was left to film were bullet holes in the wall and broken glass on the floor. Because it was Belfast the blood was soon mopped up and the commotion died down, and even as they were filming the drinking went on and new customers arrived. A stripper came on and went through her act, and Grey and the soundman had stayed to watch. Just as they were about to leave, the gunmen abruptly returned, pushing through the crowd near the door and shouting threats. Both carried Armalite rifles, pointed upward. Without thinking what he was doing, Grey hefted the camera to his shoulder and started filming. He forced his way through the crowd, going right up to the gunmen, filming their faces. He was there when they opened fire, pumping a dozen rounds into the ceiling, bringing plaster down in flakes and lumps. Then they left.

Grey’s film was never transmitted, but it was later used by the security forces to identify the men, and they were arrested and convicted.

Grey’s reckless act of courage had been rewarded by a cash bonus from the network, but the incident was soon forgotten. What no one, including Grey, could understand was why the gunmen had let him film them, why they had not shot him.

Standing there in the racket of the drinking club in Liverpool, Grey was remembering something Sue had said. She had reminded him of the story he must have told her, of filming in the street riot. She said: in the heat of the moment you made yourself invisible.

Had that happened in the bar in Belfast too? Was there after all something in what she said?

He completed the rest of the filming in the club, now feeling self-conscious, thinking himself an intruder into the depressing lives of these people, and was glad when the equipment was packed up and they could return to the hotel.

III

As soon as he was awake in the morning, Grey telephoned Sue at the house. She came to the phone sounding groggy with sleep. He told her that the schedule had had to be extended, and that he would not be back in London for another two days. She sounded disappointed, but did not question him. She said she had been doing some thinking, and wanted to talk to him. Grey promised he would contact her as soon as he was back, and they hung up.

After breakfast the crew met in the lobby before dispersing. Grey noted down a few phone numbers, and provisionally arranged to meet the producer in London the following week. When they had all said their farewells, he hitched a lift in the car of the assistant director, who was driving to Manchester. Grey was dropped off a short bus ride away from the suburb where Sue had said she was born.

He located the address in a telephone directory and walked through the residential streets to find it. The house was a prewar detached villa, standing in a short cul-de-sac.

A woman answered the door, smiling at him but looking cautious.

“Excuse me, are you Mrs. Kewley?”

“Yes. Can I help you?”

“You have a daughter Susan, living in London?”

The smile disappeared. “It’s not bad news, is it?”

“Not at all. My name’s Richard Grey, and I’m a friend of Susan’s. I’ve been working around here, and I thought I’d call on you and say hello.”

“There hasn’t been an accident, has there?”

“I’m sorry—I should have telephoned first. Susan’s fine, and she sends her love. I didn’t mean to alarm you.”

“You said your name was … ?”

“Richard Grey. Look, if it’s inconvenient, I—”

“Would you like to come in for a few minutes? I’ll make some tea.”

There was a long corridor inside, with a glimpse through to a kitchen at the far end. Carpeted stairs rose from the hall, with small framed paintings hanging from the wall. He was shown into the front room, where chairs and ornaments were set out with neat precision. Mrs. Kewley bent down to light the gas fire, and straightened slowly.

“Is it tea you would like, Mr. Grey? Or I could make some coffee.” Her accent was northern, with no detectable trace of the Scottish he had expected.

“Tea, please. I’m sorry to arrive without warning, but—”

“I’m always glad to meet Susan’s friends. I won’t be a moment.”

There was a photograph of Sue on the mantelpiece: her hair was longer, and tied back with a ribbon. She looked much younger, but her awkward way of sitting when she knew she was being looked at was the same. The photo was mounted in a frame, and the name of the studio was inscribed in one corner. He guessed it had been taken shortly before she left home.

Grey prowled quietly around the room, sensing that it was not often used. He could hear voices and the movement of crockery at the distant end of the corridor. He felt like an intruder, knowing that Sue would be furious if she found out what he was doing. He heard voices coming down the corridor, so he sat down in one of the chairs by the fire. A woman said,” ‘Bye now, May. I’ll pop in again tomorrow.”

“‘Bye, Alice.” The front door opened and closed, and Sue’s mother came into the room with a tray.

They were overpolite and uncomfortable with each other, Grey because of his uncertain motives for being there, and Mrs. Kewley presumably because of his unannounced arrival. She looked rather older than he would have expected Sue’s mother to be, with hair already white and a slight stiffness in her movements. But her face was unmistakably like Sue’s, and he was pleased at glimpsing little similarities in gesture.

“Are you the friend who is a photographer?” she said.

“That’s right … well, I’m a film cameraman.”

“Oh yes. Susan told us about you. You were in an accident, weren’t you?”

They talked for a while about the bomb and his spell in the hospital, Grey surprised to learn that Sue had talked about him to her parents. Realizing that what people say to their parents is often a guarded form of the whole truth, he was cautious about what he said of Sue’s present life, but Mrs. Kewley said that Sue wrote many letters home. She knew all about Sue’s career, and even had a scrapbook of press clippings, many of which Grey had never seen. It was a small insight into Sue, discovering how much work she had sold and that she was obviously well established in her field.

When the scrapbook had been put aside Mrs. Kewley said, “Is Susan still going out with Niall?”

“I’m not sure … I don’t think so. I didn’t know you had met him.”

“Oh yes, we know Niall well. Susan brought him home with her one weekend. A very nice boy, we thought, though rather quiet. I think he is some kind of writer, but he wouldn’t say too much about it. Is he a friend of yours too?”

“No, I’ve never met him to speak to.”

“I see.” Mrs. Kewley suddenly smiled nervously and glanced away, just like Sue. She presumably thought she had made a gaffe, so Grey was quick to reassure her that he and Sue were simply friends. This moment off her guard broke the ice, and Mrs. Kewley became more talkative after it. She told him about her other daughter Rosemary, married and living a few miles away in Stockport. There were two grandchildren, whom Sue had never mentioned.

Grey was thinking about Niall, and the account Sue had given him of the one occasion she had brought him to this house. It had been very different from the scene of indulgent parental approval that Mrs. Kewley implied, and according to Sue had led directly to her first separation from Niall. He remembered her story of Niall the invisible companion, distracting her and generally acting badly. Yet Mrs. Kewley had obviously met him, found nothing unusual about him, and had even formed a favorable opinion of him.

“My husband will be home from work soon,” she said. “He only works part-time now. You will stay and meet him, won’t you?”

“I’d like to very much,” Grey said, “but I have to catch a train to London this afternoon. Maybe I’ll meet your husband before I leave.”

She started asking innocent questions about Sue: what her room was like, the sort of people she worked with, whether she took enough exercise. Grey answered her, feeling uncomfortable, aware that he could easily blunder into some minor contradiction with Sue’s own version of her life. The revelation about Niall underlined how little he really knew or understood about Sue. To avoid the problem he started asking questions of his own. It was not long before a photograph album was produced. Feeling more like a spy than ever, Grey looked with interest at pictures of Sue’s childhood.

She had been a pretty child in little dresses with ribbons in her hair. The plainness that he found so intriguing developed later; in her teens Sue began to look gawky and sullen, standing obediently for the photographs but averting her face. These pictures were passed over quickly, Mrs. Kewley obviously remembering particular moments.

At the back of the album, not mounted like the others but slipped loosely inside the pages, was a color snapshot. It slid to the floor as Mrs. Kewley was putting away the album, and Grey picked it up. It was a more recent picture of Sue, looking very much as he knew her. She was standing in a garden next to a flower bed, and beside her was a young man with his arm around her shoulders.

“Who is this?” Grey said.

“That’s Niall, of course.”

“Niall?”

“Yes—I thought you knew him. We took that picture in the garden, the time he visited us.”

“Oh yes, I recognize him now.” Grey stared at the photograph. Until this moment his unseen rival had possessed minatory powers in Grey’s mind, but to see him at last, even in a rather blurred snapshot, made him immediately less of a threat. Niall was young-looking, with a slight build, a shock of fair hair, and an expression that looked both surly and conceited. He was smartly dressed and had a cigarette in his mouth. His face was turned toward Sue and he held her possessively, but she was standing ill at ease and looked stressful.

He passed the photograph back to Mrs. Kewley and she slipped it back inside the album. Not realizing the effect the picture had had on him, she began talking about Sue and the years when she was growing up. Grey kept his silence and listened. What emerged was a story supported by neither the pictures he had just seen nor Sue’s own version. According to her mother, Sue had been a contented girl, clever at school, popular with the other girls, talented at drawing. She had been a good daughter, close to her sister, considerate of her parents. Her teachers spoke glowingly of her, and friends in the neighborhood were still always asking after her. Until the girls grew up and left home they had been a happy, intimate family, sharing most things. Now they were very proud of her, feeling that she was fulfilling the promise she had always shown. Her parents’ only regret was that she could not visit home more often, but they knew how busy she was.

Something was missing, and after a while Grey sensed what it was. Parents who spoke well of their children usually told amusing stories about them, harmless anecdotes about childish foibles. Mrs. Kewley spoke in generalizations and platitudes, reciting what sounded like a well-rehearsed eulogy. But her enthusiasm was genuine and she smiled often at her memories, a kind woman, a nice woman.

Just after half-past twelve her husband arrived home. Grey saw him on the path outside the window, and Mrs. Kewley went out to meet him. Moments later he entered the room, shook hands with Grey and smiled in an embarrassed way.

“I’d better put lunch on,” Mrs. Kewley said. “Would you like to join us?”

“No thanks, I really must be going soon.”

The two men were left together, standing facing each other, an awkward silence.

“Perhaps you’d care for a drink before you leave?” said Mr. Kewley, still with the morning’s newspaper under his arm.

“Yes, thank you.” But the only alcohol in the house turned out to be sweet sherry, a drink Grey disliked. He accepted it with good grace, sipping at it politely. Soon afterward Mrs. Kewley returned and the three of them sat in a semicircle in the little room, talking about the firm Mr. Kewley worked for. Grey finished his drink as quickly as he could, then said he really must be getting to the station. The other two seemed relieved, but they all went through the motions of renewed invitations to lunch and grateful refusal. Grey shook hands again with Sue’s father, and Mrs. Kewley saw him to the door.

He had walked only a short distance from the house when he heard the door reopen.

“Mr. Grey!” Sue’s mother came quickly toward him. In the daylight she looked suddenly younger, more like Sue herself. “Just something!”

“What is it?” he said, smiling to reassure her, because unexpectedly she had a different look, a new urgency.

“I’m sorry—I don’t want to delay you.” She glanced back at the house as if expecting her husband to be following. “It’s Susan. How is she?”

“She’s fine—really.”

“No, you don’t understand. Please tell me!”

“I don’t know what to say. She’s happy, working hard. Enjoying life.”

“But do you see her?”

“Yes, from time to time. Once or twice a week.”

Mrs. Kewley seemed close to tears. She said, “My husband and I … well, we don’t really know Susan anymore. She writes to us, and sometimes rings us up, but

… you know …”

“She talks about you a lot,” Grey said. “You mean a great deal to her.”

“I’d love to see her again. Please tell her that.” She sobbed once but controlled it quickly, turning her head up and away, her chest heaving.

“I’ll tell her as soon as I see her.”

Mrs. Kewley nodded, then walked quickly back to the house. The door closed and Grey stood silently in the street, aware that Sue’s account of her life had oddly been confirmed. He wished he had not called.

IV

Grey had promised Sue he would phone her as soon as he was in London, but he was tired when he arrived back from Manchester. In the morning he realized he had an extra day, and decided to contact her that evening.

He felt sorry he had visited her parents, particularly as he could not tell her what he had done. Nothing had been established by the trip. Now that it was over he acknowledged that his real motive had been curiosity about her invisibility—proof or disproof, whichever might have been produced.

All he had found were clues to a difficult adolescence, now remembered by her parents in a synoptic way, partially suppressed, accounted for normally. If she had been invisible to them it was failure of vision of another kind: an inability to see her growing up and changing, rejecting her parents’ lives and background.

The pressure of domestic needs grew on him. Returning home from a trip always involved the same routine: a backlog of mail, a shortage of clean clothes, food to be bought. He was out most of the morning attending to this, and while he was around the shops he called in at the newsagent who was still delivering the tabloid newspaper every weekday morning. He loathed the paper for what it was, with its emphasis on royal visits, gossip about film stars, photographs of seminude models and salacious reporting of sex crimes, but in addition it was a daily reminder of his long stay in the hospital. Grey was told that the paper was being delivered on the instructions of the newspaper management, but he persuaded the newsagent he wanted it no more.

Returning with clean clothes and a bag of groceries, Grey discovered someone just walking away from his front door. It was a young woman with short dark hair, and as soon as she saw him she smiled expectantly.

“Mr. Grey? I thought you must be out. I was just leaving.”

“I’ve been shopping,” he said redundantly. He knew he recognized her, but not from where.

“I tried to telephone you yesterday, but there was no answer.” She saw his frown and added, “I don’t suppose you remember me … I’m Alexandra Gowers. A student of Dr. Hurdis’s.”

“Miss Gowers! Of course! Would you … like to come in?”

“Dr. Hurdis gave me your address. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

He opened the door, went in first, then tried to stand to one side to let her go in front. She squeezed past him in the narrow hallway, picking up a slip of paper. “I had left a note for you,” she said, and crumpled it.

He followed her up the stairs at his usual slow pace.

He was trying to remember what she had looked like before: his memory was of a rather severe face, heavy and shapeless clothes, spectacles, unstyled and overlong hair. She had changed since then.

He showed her into his living room.

“I ought to put this stuff away,” he said. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

He moved about in the kitchen, boiling water and putting away his groceries, trying to think what he knew of her. He remembered her being there when he was hypnotized the first time. He had heard nothing from Dr. Hurdis since leaving Middlecombe.

The girl was sitting in one of the chairs when he took the coffee in.

“I was wondering if I could make an appointment to interview you sometime?” she said.

“What about?”

“I’m doing postgraduate research at Exeter University. Dr. Hurdis is my supervisor. I’m writing a dissertation on the subjective experience of hypnosis, and I’m trying to interview as many people as possible.”

“Well, I don’t think I can be much help,” Grey said. He poured the coffees, adding milk and sugar, not looking at her. “I don’t remember very much about it now.”

“That’s part of the reason I’d like to talk to you. Could you suggest a suitable time?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to talk about it.” She said nothing, stirring her coffee. Grey was feeling hostile to her, unreasonably. It was as if once you became a case history they would never leave you alone afterward. She was reminding him of what it was like to be in a wheelchair, constantly in pain and discomfort, helpless in the hands of those trying to cure you. He had thought that once he left the hospital all that would be behind him.

“So you won’t agree to an interview?” she said.

“I’m sure you can find plenty of other people to talk to.”

He noticed that the notebook she had been holding had now been returned to her bag.

“The trouble is that I can’t,” she said. “Dr. Hurdis will only let me approach patients whose sessions I’ve actually been present at, with their permission. The other people I can interview are mostly experimental subjects— volunteers, other students. Clinical cases are different, and yours is particularly interesting.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re articulate, because of what happened under hypnosis, because the circumstances—”

“What did happen under hypnosis?”

She shrugged, picked up her coffee to sip at it. “Well, that’s what I wanted to discuss with you. I shouldn’t have troubled you.”

“No, it’s all right.” His curiosity aroused, Grey was already regretting his feelings of hostility. “We can talk about it if you wish. But look, you’ve turned up Out of the blue. I was going to have lunch in a few minutes. Let’s have something to eat, and give me a few minutes to get used to the idea.”

Ashamed of the food he bought for himself—when he was alone he survived on sandwiches, fried eggs and fruit—he suggested going to the local pub for a drink and a bar meal. As they walked slowly down the road, Grey suddenly identified the teasing memory he had of her. He remembered the moment under hypnosis when Hurdis had told him to look at this girl, and he had known she was there but had been unable to see her. It was an uncanny echo, pre-existing, of everything Sue had said.

They found the pub only half full, and had one of the tables to themselves. With the food and drink in front of them, Alexandra told him about herself. After graduating she had been unable to find a job, and so had stayed on at Exeter to do research, postponing the problem of work and aiming for higher qualifications. She was surviving on a shoestring because her grant covered only the tuition. She lived with her brother in London, and when in Exeter stayed in a house shared by a number of other students. She thought the research would probably last a few more months, but after that she would have to find a job.

Talking about this led to the subject of her dissertation. She said that the phenomenon that interested her was spontaneous amnesia—the hypnotic subject who, without suggestion from the hypnotist, could not afterward recall what had happened during the session.

“What interests me about your case is that you were being treated for traumatic amnesia, that you seemed to recover some of your memory under hypnosis, but afterward could not remember remembering.”

“That about sums it up,” Grey said. “That’s why I can’t help you.”

“But Dr. Hurdis says that you have now recovered your memory.”

“Only partially.”

She reached into her bag and produced her notebook. “Do you mind? I seem to have started interviewing you.” Grey shook his head, smiling, as she put on her spectacles and turned the pages quickly. She said, “You were in France … before the accident?”

“No, I remember being in France. I don’t think I was ever actually there.”

“Dr. Hurdis said you were pretty sure. You were speaking French, for instance.”

“That happened in later sessions, too. I think what happened was that I put together a sort of memory— something that never really occurred, but I felt that it had. At the time it was important to remember something.”

“Paramnesia,” Alexandra said.

“I know. Hurdis told me.”

“Do you remember this?” She produced a piece of paper, curled at the edges and obviously folded and unfolded many times. “Dr. Hurdis asked me to return it to you.”

Grey recognized it at once: it was the passage he had written during the first hypnotic session. Gatwick Airport, the departure lounge, the crowds of passengers. It was banal and familiar to him, and after glancing over it he refolded it and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

“You don’t seem interested,” Alexandra said.

“Not now.”

He left her briefly to buy more drinks at the bar. Another memory from their first meeting was tugging at him: as they parted, her ingenuous remark about stage hypnotists and the trick of making their subjects fail to see people’s clothes. Sue had been dominating his thoughts at the time, but for a few moments Alexandra had innocently teased him. It was refreshing now to be with a girl who was not Sue, because with Sue there was always the undercurrent of what was allowed to be said, what was admitted, what was in the background. Alexandra had the attractive quality of being uncomplicated, because he hardly knew her. He liked her seriousness and her singlemindedness, the way she intimidated him without meaning to. She was more mature now, less self-conscious. While the barman poured the drinks, Grey glanced back at her. She was looking through her notebook, her short dark hair swept behind an ear—obviously a habit from the time when it fell in her eyes.

Back at the table Grey said, “What else happened that day?”

“You told Dr. Hurdis you couldn’t remember the trance.”

“Not all of it. I know he told me to go into a deeper trance, but the next thing I knew he was waking me up.”

“All right, this is what interests me. Something rather unusual occurred, which Dr. Hurdis did not tell you. It can be explained, but neither of us had ever encountered it before, and on that day Dr. Hurdis said it would only complicate matters to talk about it.”

“What was it?” Grey said.

“It was when you were speaking French. You were mumbling, and it was difficult to hear, so we were both standing very close to you, looking directly at you. Then something happened. It’s hard to describe it exactly, but what it felt like was that it suddenly seemed to me we had finished, that the consultation was over and you had left the room. I distinctly remember Dr. Hurdis saying, ‘I’m going into Exeter after lunch, so would you like a lift?’ I put my notebook away and picked up my coat. Dr. Hurdis said he wanted to speak to one of the other doctors, but would meet me for lunch in a few minutes. We left the office together, and I followed him out of the door. As I did so I remember looking back at the chair you had been in, and you weren’t there. I’m absolutely certain of that. We walked along the corridor to the stairs, but then Dr. Hurdis suddenly stopped dead, looked at me and said, ‘What on earth are we doing?’ I didn’t know what he meant at first, but then he clicked his fingers very sharply, and this startled me. It was like being awakened out of a dream. ‘Miss Gowers, we haven’t finished the consultation!’ We hurried back to the office, and you were there, sitting back in the armchair, still in the trance and mumbling to yourself.”

She paused to take a drink. Grey was staring at the table between them, thinking about that day.

“Do you have any memory of this at all?” Alexandra said.

“No. Go on.”

“Well, Dr. Hurdis was very shaken by this. He can be difficult when he’s angry, and he started bossing me around. I took out my notebook again and tried to listen to what you were saying, but after a few seconds he pushed me out of the way. He spoke to you in the trance, telling you to describe what you were doing. It was then that you asked for something to write with, and Dr. Hurdis snatched my notebook and pen from me and gave them to you. You wrote that.” She indicated the pocket containing the slip of paper. “While you were writing, Dr. Hurdis looked at me and said, ‘When the patient comes out of the trance we must say nothing of this.’ I asked him what had happened, and he said we could discuss it later. He repeated that we must not under any circumstances talk about it in front of you. You were still writing, so Dr. Hurdis took the pen away from you and gave me back my notebook. You called out that you wanted to go on writing, and sounded distressed. Dr. Hurdis said he was going to bring you out of the trance, and again warned me not to say anything. He calmed you down, then started waking you up. You can probably remember the rest.”

“So you made me vanish,” Grey said.

“Not exactly.”

“You said there was an explanation. What is it?”

“Negative hallucination. It sometimes happens that the process of hypnosis, the repetition of words, the soothing advice, the quiet room, all these can lull the hypnotist himself into a light trance, and he becomes as suggestible as his subject. It’s a fairly common occurrence, although there are precautions the hypnotist usually takes. Dr. Hurdis and I are both good hypnotic subjects, and what we think must have happened was that we both became hypnotized. If so, then it’s possible that we both had the same negative hallucination, in which we were unable to see you. It’s extremely rare, but it is the only possible explanation.”

Grey was thinking of something Sue had said, that invisibility depended as much on the unconscious attitude of the observer as the ability of the person making himself invisible. Some can see, some cannot. Was it all a negative hallucination?

Aware of his silence, Alexandra said, “I know it doesn’t sound very likely, but it is possible.”

“Has it ever happened before?”

“I’ve researched it as far as I can. There have been similar cases when a hypnotist was working alone, but I believe there is no precedent for both the hypnotist and an observer to share an experience.”

What would Sue say to that? Was her belief in her own invisibility accountable for in terms that Dr. Hurdis and Alexandra could rationally confirm? He remembered the day they had been out photographing the shoppers, and the people Sue claimed were natural invisibles. He thought of the photographs he had seen of Sue and Niall. The camera could not induce negative hallucinations.

“So do you think that’s what really happened?”

“Unless you actually made yourself invisible,” Alexandra said, smiling. “There’s no other explanation.”

“What about invisibility?” Grey said on an impulse. “Isn’t that possible? I mean—”

“Actual, corporeal invisibility?” She was still smiling. “Not unless you believe in magic. You yourself had a negative hallucination induced by Dr. Hurdis, and you weren’t able to see me. But I wasn’t really invisible, except to you.”

“But what’s the difference?” Grey said. “I couldn’t see you, so you were to all intents invisible. You say that I became invisible to you and Hurdis. Was I still really there?”

“Of course you were. We simply stopped noticing you.”

“But that’s the same thing. You made me invisible.”

“Only subjectively. We made you seem invisible by failing to see you.”

Alexandra began to tell him of another case history, a woman who spontaneously hallucinated negatively, and who was treated with hypnosis, and Grey listened to her. But he was also thinking in parallel, trying to reinterpret everything Sue had told him in these terms.

If what she said was true, and she apparently believed it was, then perhaps it was possible that some people had the unconscious ability to hypnotize people around them so they could not be seen. The failure to notice: was it a natural condition? Or something that could be induced by certain people?

It felt as if it might be right. As Alexandra had said, however unlikely it might be it was the only possible rational explanation, even though the extent of Sue’s claims increased the unlikelihood.

It was difficult to think about this and listen to Alexandra at the same time, and as the conversation became more general he let it go. She asked him about his recovery, how he was adapting once more to normal life, what remaining problems there were. He told her about his recent filming work, and said he had briefly visited Manchester. Somehow, he never mentioned Sue.

When the pub closing time came, they walked together back to his flat. Outside the door Alexandra said, “I must be getting home. Thanks for talking to me about this.”

“I think I’ve learned more than you.”

“I just wanted to confirm what I thought might have happened.”

They shook hands formally, as they had done on their first meeting.

Grey said, “I was wondering … shall we meet again for another drink? Perhaps one evening?”

“Yes, I’d like that,” she said, looking at him with a smile. “But no more interviews.”

They made a date for the following week.

V

Grey visited Sue in the evening, and as soon as he arrived he knew something was wrong. It was not long before he found out what it was: Sue’s mother had telephoned her and told her of his visit.

At first, he tried to lie.

“We had to go to Manchester for some filming,” he said. “I decided on an impulse to look them up.”

“You said you were working in Toxteth. What the hell does that have to do with Manchester?”

“All right, I went specially. I wanted to meet them.”

“But why? They don’t know anything about me! What did they tell you?”

“I know you think I was spying on you, but it really wasn’t like that. Sue, I had to know.”

“Know what? What could they possibly tell you about me?”

“They are your parents,” Grey said.

“But they’ve hardly seen me since I was twelve years old!”

“That’s why I went. Something happened while I was filming in Liverpool.” He told her about the club, and the memory it had prompted of the pub in Belfast. “It made me see everything you had said in a different light— whether, in fact, there might be some truth in it after all.”

“I knew you weren’t believing me.”

“It’s not that. I do believe you … but I have to know for myself. I’m sorry if you think I’ve been snooping around, but the idea came to me on the spur of the moment and I didn’t really think. I just wanted to talk to someone else who knew you.”

“I’ve been invisible to Mum and Dad since I was a kid. The only times they’ve seen me have been when I’ve forced myself to be seen.”

“That’s not the impression I got from them,” Grey said. “You’re right that they don’t know you very well, but that’s because you’ve grown up and left home. It happens to many people with their parents.”

Sue was shaking her head. “That’s just the way they account for it. It’s how people deal with someone who’s invisible around them. They automatically come up with some rational version to explain to themselves what’s happened. It’s a way of coping.”

Grey thought of Alexandra, her rationalization.

“Your mother said she had met Niall.”

“That’s impossible!” But she looked surprised.

“It’s not how it felt to me. You told me yourself that he went home with you once.”

“Niall was invisible the whole time. Richard, they think they saw him. They know about Niall, I told them about him years ago. The only time he’s been home with me was that one weekend. But they couldn’t have seen him because it’s simply not possible.”

“Then why does your mother think she knows him? She’s even got a photograph of him—with you, in the back garden.”

“I know. They took several. Niall would be in them all. Don’t you see, that’s how she explains it to herself! When he was there with me they must have been aware of what was going on. Niall registered with them … even someone as profoundly invisible as Niall is always there. After we had left they would unconsciously have tried to account for all the tension. When they had the pictures developed, the explanation would have presented itself. Thinking back, they would seem to remember having met him.”

“Yes, but it’s just as likely that they did see him. It doesn’t prove anything one way or the other.”

“Why do you need proof of all this?”

“Because it’s what is coming between us. First it’s Niall, now it’s this. I want to believe you, and I do believe you, but everything you tell me can be explained two ways.”

Throughout all this they had been in her room, Sue squatting cross-legged on her bed, Grey sitting in the chair by her desk. Now she left the bed and paced about the room.

“All right,” Sue said. “While you were away I gave this a lot of thought. If you’re right, and this is what’s standing between us, I want to put it right. We’re drifting apart, Richard, and I don’t like that. If you want proof, I think I can provide it.”

“How?”

“There are two ways. The first is simple—it’s Niall. He is the proof. He’s influenced us from the moment we met, and he’s actually been with us, physically been present, yet you’ve been totally unaware of him.”

“You see, that’s not proof to me,” Grey said. “It works either way. He’s here and with us, as you say, lurking around invisibly … or he’s never been near me and I haven’t met him. Just because I haven’t seen him doesn’t mean he’s invisible.”

“I thought you’d say that.” She was combing through her hair with her fingers as she paced about the room. She looked agitated, but determined too.

“I believe Niall really exists,” Grey said. “But try to see it from my point of view. You’ve only told me about Niall, and since I left the hospital you’ve only told me about him in the past tense. Even you haven’t seen him for a long time.”

“That’s true.”

“What’s the other proof?”

She halted her prowling. “That’s more complicated. I’m hungry now. I’ve bought some food to cook. I can’t afford to keep eating out.”

Grey said, “Let’s go to a restaurant. I’ll pay.”

“No, the food will waste.” She had already produced a grocery bag and taken down a couple of saucepans.

“Tell me while you’re cooking,” he said.

“It’s something I have to show you. Sit there, and keep out of the way.”

Grey did as he was told, swiveling to and fro in her office chair. She had only cooked for him once or twice, but he liked how she went about it. She had a casual way of tossing rice and meat and vegetables into pans and coming up with something delicious. It was pleasant to watch her doing something ordinary; they spent so much of their time obsessed with themselves.

But while she was cooking Grey said, “As a matter of interest, where is Niall these days?”

“I was wondering when you would ask me that.” She had not turned to look at him. “It doesn’t matter any more, does it?”

“I suppose not. But from everything you said, he was never going to leave you alone.”

“Nor will he.” She was chopping vegetables, scooping them a few at a time into the steaming saucepan. “He could be here in the room with us now, for all I know. Because he can make himself completely invisible, there’s nothing much I can do about it. But what I can do, and have done, is change myself. I finally worked out what I was doing wrong. I was letting Niall make it matter to me. Now … I don’t care. Niall is everywhere. He can go anywhere it’s possible to be, and almost nothing can stop him. He can do anything he likes. But the point is, if that’s so then it doesn’t matter whether he’s actually there or not—the knowledge that he has that ability is the same as him actually using it. These days I assume he’s everywhere I go; I take it for granted he’s watching me, listening to me. It makes no difference to me whether he’s really there or that I’m imagining it: the effect is that he leaves me alone and that’s what I wanted all along.” She turned down the cooking rings to their lowest setting and put the lids on the pans. “Right—the food will be ready in ten minutes, and after that we’re going out for a walk.”

VI

It had been raining earlier, but now the night was clear. Traffic went by, the engines loud against the shiny wetness of the streets. They passed several pubs, a late-opening newsagent, an Indian restaurant with a blue neon sign. Soon they were walking down a wide residential road that ran along the side of Crouch Hill; the lights of north London glittered before them. Overhead, an airliner with brilliant strobe lights crossed the sky, heading down toward Heathrow, miles to the west.

“Are we going anywhere particular?” Grey said.

“No, you can choose.”

“What about: around the block, then back to your place?”

Sue came to a halt beneath one of the streetlights. “You want proof, and I’m going to give it to you. After that, will you accept it for what it is?”

“If it’s proof.”

“It will be, I promise you. Look at me, Richard … do I seem any different?”

He looked at her in the orange glow from the sodium lamp. “The light doesn’t do anything for you.”

“I’ve been invisible ever since we left home.”

“Sue, I can still see you.”

“No one else can. What I’m going to do is make you invisible too, and then we’re going to go into one of these houses.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely.”

“All right, but the problem is me.”

“No, it isn’t.” She stretched out a hand and took his. “You’re invisible now. Anything I choose to touch becomes invisible.”

He could not help but glance down at himself: chest and legs, solidly there. A car went past, its flasher indicating a left turn. Spray flew briefly around them.

Sue said: “No one can see us. The only thing you must do is hold my hand, and whatever happens don’t let go.” She tightened her grip. “Now, pick a house.”

Her voice had taken on an earnest note, a charge of excitement, and Grey felt a tingle of the same.

“What about this one here?”

They both looked at it. Most of the windows were dark, but a pale red glow came through curtains on the top floor.

“It looks as if it’s been converted into flats,” Sue said. “Let’s find another.”

They walked along, holding hands, staring at the houses. They went to a few front doors, but where there were several bell pushes and a list of names Sue suggested finding somewhere else. Too many locked doors inside. At the end of the row the house had a darkened porch, and a single bell. Behind the curtains of the front room they could see the glow of a television screen.

“This will do,” Sue said. “Now let’s hope there’s a door open.”

“I thought you would break a window.”

“We can do anything we like, but I’d rather not cause damage.”

They went through the garden and along a narrow passage, pressing past rain-damp trees and bushes. The room at the back was brightly lit with a fluorescent tube, and when Sue tried the door it opened easily.

“We won’t stay long,” she said. “Don’t let go of my hand.”

She pushed open the door and they went inside. Grey closed the door behind them. They were in a kitchen. Two women stood with their backs against a work surface, one of them holding a sleeping baby. On the table in front of them were two cheap tumblers containing beer, and an ashtray with a cigarette smoldering. An older child, wearing a soiled romper suit, was playing on the vinyl-tiled floor with a plastic car and some wooden blocks. The woman with the baby was saying, “… but when you get in there they treat you like rubbish, so I said to him don’t you go talking to me like that, and he just looked at me like I was dirt, and you know what, I’d paid thirty pounds to get in and they look at you like you was rubbish… .” Grey felt huge and self-conscious in the cramped room and wanted to edge past the two women, but Sue led him to the sink where she turned on the cold tap. The water splashed down noisily onto the unwashed crockery stacked below, several large droplets spraying up and falling on the floor. Listening to her friend, the woman walked around the table and turned it off. On her way back she picked up the cigarette and put it in her mouth.

Sue said, “Let’s see what they’re watching on television.”

Grey winced because her voice was so loud, but neither of the women appeared to notice. Still clutching Sue’s hand, he followed her out of the room and into the short corridor leading to the front of the house. Here a couple of old bicycles leaned against the staircase banisters, and three large cardboard boxes containing bottles were stacked one on top of another. Sue opened the second door and they went inside.

A soccer match was playing on television, the volume turned up loud. The room was full of men, young and middleaged, sitting forward with their arms resting on their knees, holding beer cans or smoking cigarettes. The air was thick with smoke, and the men were responding to the commentary and the match; England was playing Yugoslavia, and losing. Derision and ridicule poured out whenever the England side lost control of the ball.

Sue said, “Let’s have a look at them.”

She turned on the overhead light and led Grey across the room. There were three adults and four teenagers.

“Knock that bleeding light off, John,” one of the older men said, not looking away from the screen. One of the teenagers got up and switched off the light. Returning to his seat he had to push past Grey, who instinctively eased himself to the side to make way. Sue gripped his hand again.

“Shall we sit down?” she said.

Before he could answer she led him toward the sofa, where two men were sitting. Neither of them looked up, but one shuffled forward so that he sat on the floor and the other moved up to make room for them. Sue and Grey sat down, Grey feeling certain that their presence must register at any moment. The match went on, and England missed another chance. Contemptuous noises roared out in the room, and beer cans hissed wetly open.

“How do you feel?” Sue said, raising her voice over the noise.

“They’re going to see us in a moment.”

“No they’re not. You wanted proof, and this is it.” He noticed how her voice had changed; it had a thick, sensuous quality, reminding him of her lovemaking. The palm of her hand was sweating. “Want to see more?” she said.

She got up from the sofa, dragging Grey behind her. To his surprise she went directly to the television set, stood in front of the screen, blocking the men’s view, and switched channels. After a couple of tries she found a studio discussion, apparently about banking economics. She stood back, and she and Grey watched the men’s reaction.

They were behaving as if the match had suddenly ended. The mood changed and relaxed, the men sat back, lit more cigarettes. They were complaining about the match, the strategy, the management of the side, the selection of the team.

Grey said, “They knew you had turned on the light. Won’t they realize you switched channels?”

“Not while we’re standing here by the set. For the moment they’re all assuming that one of the others did it. They’ll go back to it when we leave.”

“But surely they know now?”

“They know we’re here, but they can’t see us. Have any of them looked at us?”

“Not directly, no.”

“They can’t.” Sue was looking flushed, her lips were moist. “Watch this.”

With her free hand Sue quickly unbuttoned the top of her blouse. Pulling Grey behind her she went toward one of the men, and with a deft movement reached inside and scooped out one of her breasts. She leaned toward him, holding the nipple just a few inches from his face. He carried on talking match strategy to his friend, utterly ignoring her.

Grey tugged Sue back by her hand. “Don’t do that!”

“They can’t see me!”

“All right, but I don’t like you doing it.”

She faced him, her blouse open and her breast exposed. “Doesn’t this turn you on?”

“Not like that.” But he could feel himself arousing.

“I always feel randy doing this.” She pressed his hand to her breast, where the nipple was a firm bead of excitement. “Do you want to make love?”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, come on—let’s do it. We can do anything we like.”

“Sue, it’s impossible.” He was too nervous, too aware of the roomful of men.

“Let’s fuck now. On the floor—in front of them.”

There had always been an incongruous coarseness in Sue when she made love, but it had never been as blatant as this before. Her free hand was at the front of his trousers, pulling at his zipper.

“Not here,” he said. “Outside.”

They went quickly into the hall, and then Sue saw the stairs and rushed up them, still holding his hand. They found a room with a bed and threw themselves on it. They loosened their clothes, and coupled almost at once. Sue, when she came, let out a shriek of pleasure, taking his hair in handfuls and snatching it painfully. He had never known her as abandoned as this.

They were lying on the bed, still joined, when the door opened and one of the women they had seen in the kitchen came in. Grey tensed and turned his face away in a desperate attempt to hide. Sue said in a normal voice, “Keep still. She doesn’t know we’re here.”

Grey looked back and watched as the woman opened a wardrobe door. She stood looking at herself in the full-length mirror, then began to undress. When she was naked she stood in front of the mirror again, turning from side to side. Her buttocks were heavy and dimpled, her belly sagged, and her breasts fell flat, pointing outward. The woman leaned forward, looking at her eyes in the reflection, pulling down the lower lids. She farted noisily. When she stood back again she tried to shape her hair with her hands, still turning to and fro, looking critically at herself. Grey could see himself and Sue reflected in the mirror behind her. He felt a deep sense of revulsion, knowing they were violating an intimacy. As his sexual desire faded he began to recoil away from Sue, letting himself slip out of her.

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, holding him down against her. “Don’t move, Richard! Stay until she’s gone.”

“But she’s going to get into bed!”

“Not yet. She can’t while we’re here.”

After another few seconds the woman sighed and closed the wardrobe door, shutting away the mirror. She took a dressing gown from the door and put it on. Before leaving the room she lit a cigarette, tossing the matchbox onto the bedside table. Her cloud of smoke swirled by the door when she had gone.

“Let’s get out, Sue. You’ve proved your point.”

He moved away from her and stood by the bed, pulling up his underpants and trousers, tucking his shirt away. He knew that now Sue was no longer touching him he was visible again, but all he wanted was to get out of this house and leave these people alone. Revulsion still filled him.

Sue finished buttoning up her clothes as quickly as he did, and took his hand again.

“Nothing can happen,” she said.

“Yes, but we shouldn’t be here.”

He peered around the open door onto the landing. The woman was standing in the bathroom with the door open, wiping cream on her face. She then closed and locked the door.

“This is what you used to do with Niall, isn’t it?”

“I used to live like this. I slept in other people’s houses for three years. We ate their food, used their lavatories, read their books, used their baths.”

“Didn’t you ever think about the people you were trespassing on?”

“For God’s sake!” She snatched her hand away from his. “Why do you think I tried to get out of this? I was just a kid. Don’t you understand that ever since I met you I’ve been trying to put all this behind me? This is how Niall lives now, and how he’ll live for the rest of his life. We’re here because you wanted your damned proof!”

“All right.” He kept his voice low, knowing he could be heard. Thinking of her sexual excitement, he said, “But the truth is, you still get a kick from it.”

“Of course I do! I always did. That’s the curse of invisibility. It’s like a drug.”

“I think we should get out. Let’s talk about it back at your place.” He held out his hand for her to take.

She shook her head and sat down on the bed. “Not now.”

“We’ve been here long enough.”

“Richard, I’m not invisible anymore. It started to go, after we made love.”

“Then get back into it,” Grey said.

“I can’t … I’m drained. I don’t know how.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t just make it happen anymore. Tonight was the first time in many weeks.”

“Can’t you do it long enough to get us out of here?”

“No. It’s gone.”

“Then what in hell are we going to do?”

“We’re going to have to run for it.”

“The house is full of people.”

“I know,” she said. “But the front door’s at the bottom of the stairs. It might be all right.”

“Come on, then. That woman will be back at any moment.”

But Sue did not move. She said quietly, “I always used to be scared this would happen. In the old days, with Niall. That we’d be in someone’s house, like this, and the glamour would suddenly leave us. That was always the kick, the danger of it.”

“We can’t just wait for something to happen. This is crazy!”

“You could try, Richard. You know how.”

“What?”

“Make yourself invisible—you’ve done it before.”

“I can’t remember that!”

“We were on a beach … there were some girls sunbathing. You pretended to film them. What about the pub in Belfast? Imagine you’re here filming. We’re in a corner, but you’ve got the camera and you go on using it.”

“I’m too scared of being found here! I can’t concentrate on that!”

“But that’s when you did your best filming, when you were stuck, when people were throwing petrol bombs.”

Grey narrowed his right eye, half closing the lids to approximate the narrow field of a viewfinder. He suddenly imagined the familiar touch of the sponge-rubber eyepiece, the faint vibration of the motor transmitted to his brow. He hunched a shoulder, taking the weight, and cocked his head slightly to the right. There was a power pack on his hip, a cable looping down and behind him, knocking against his shoulder blade. He imagined the soundman beside him, the gray-wrapped mike prodding up and above him from behind. He thought of the Belfast streets, a mass picket outside factory gates, a CND demonstration in Hyde Park, a food riot in Eritrea—all still vivid in his mind, moments of surging and unpredictable danger glimpsed through the lens.

Sue stood up and put a hand on his shoulder. “We can go now.”

They both heard the sound of the toilet flushing, a door opening, and then footsteps on the landing outside. A moment later the woman they had seen undressing walked into the room, the half-burned cigarette dangling from her mouth. Grey swung the camera to follow her, tightening the focus. She stepped around them, and went again to the wardrobe.

Grey led the way to the top of the stairs, then walked slowly down, one step at a time. They could hear the sounds of the televised soccer match coming through the open door of the front room. Grey panned to the room, glimpsing the backs of the men’s heads. Sue reached past him and unlatched the front door. When they were outside, she pulled it to behind them.

Grey filmed until they were on the street, then he slumped, feeling tired. Sue took his arm and brought up her mouth to kiss the side of his face, but he turned away from her, angry, worn out and repelled.

VII

There was always a next day, a waking to the realities of the present. Richard Grey rarely remembered his dreams when he awoke, although he was always aware of having dreamed. He understood them instinctively as a reorganization of actual daytime memories into a kind of symbolic code that was stored away in the unconscious. When he was at home by himself, each morning was therefore a fresh memorative start. As he muddled sleepily through the first two or three hours, glancing at his mail, reading the headlines of the newspaper, sipping hot coffee, he was aware of a kind of oneiric stew in his mind, an amalgam of mostly forgotten dreams and snatches of the day before. Conscious memories rarely came to him until he forced himself to think properly. Only after he had drunk the second cup of coffee, and had dressed and shaved and was beginning to wonder how to spend the rest of the day would he start seeing the new day in the context of the old. Continuity would return.

In the morning after the visit to the house, Grey found it more difficult than usual to wake up. He had not been especially late to bed, but there had been a long and grumpy conversation at Sue’s before he left. Somewhere in it was a conflict over sex: Sue had wanted to make love again, and he had not.

He felt disagreeable on waking. There was nothing in the mail, and the newspaper depressed him. He fried an egg and made a greasy sandwich of it, then drank coffee and stared through his window at the street below.

When he dressed he put on clean clothes and transferred the contents of his pockets. Amid the litter of coins, keys and bank notes he found the slip of paper Alexandra had given him, stuffed negligently in his jacket pocket.

He opened it carefully, flattening it with his hand on the table, and read it through. It began with the words:

The departures board showed that my flight was delayed, but I had already gone through passport control and there was no escape from the passenger lounge.

The passage continued with a description of the lounge, and concluded in the following way:

There was nowhere to sit down, nothing much to do except stand or walk about and look at the other passengers. I diverted myself with a ga—.

It was at this point that Hurdis had stopped him. The last word, which Grey knew was “game,” was only half written and there was a line scored lightly beyond it. He knew all of the rest; the story was familiar to him. Staring idly through the window Grey remembered the long journey through France, the meeting with Sue, their falling in love, their separation over Niall, then their reunion and return to England. The memories ended with his accidental involvement in the terrorist bombing.

It was all very real to him still, the only knowledge of the period he had subsequently lost. Whenever he dwelled on it, images came starkly and convincingly from it: the first time he and Sue had made love, how it had felt to be in love with her, how it felt to miss her, that long and fruitless wait in SaintTropez and the consolation of the girl from Hertz, the enervating Mediterranean heat, the taste of the food, Picasso at work in Collioure. These memories had an inner conviction, a sense of story and of events unfolding. Earlier he had thought of it all as a piece of film already edited, but thinking again it occurred to him that a closer analogy was that of seeing a movie. A cinema audience accepted on trust that the whole thing was a fiction, that it was written and directed and acted, that a large crew was somewhere out of sight behind the camera, that the film had been edited and synchronized, and music and sound effects had been added … but they nevertheless suspended their disbelief and went along with the illusion.

Grey felt as if his real life had been going on outside the cinema while he was inside watching the film … but that the memory of the film was an acceptable substitute.

This fragment of his confabulated past had another importance to him. It had sprung unbidden from his subconscious, a production of an inner need, a desperation to know. As a result it was now a part of him, even though it was not what had really happened. It dealt explicitly with his lost period, with the events leading up to the explosion. It gave him continuity.

And it excluded Sue, except as a secondary figure. It did not admit of her invisibility. The real Sue demanded a primary position, and insisted that he accept her claim to be invisible.

Thinking of Sue, Grey was reminded of the events of the night before. Since waking he had not thought about the visit to the house, although in a vague manner it had always been at the back of his mind.

Had he been suppressing it?

He had found it a profoundly disturbing experience, burdened with feelings of intrusion, violation, voyeurism, trespass. The sex with Sue, snatched from her frantic physical need, had provided only neurotic relief, lacking pleasure. He recalled the urgent undoing of clothes, of thrusting himself into her while they both still wore shoes, while their jeans tangled around their knees, while Sue’s blouse lay flatly over her half-bared breasts. Afterward the innocent woman, overweight and narcissistic, standing in her own room while strangers appraised her, and then their fear of being caught, trapped like thieves in someone else’s home.

This morning, while he stumbled around the flat in his early stupor, it had had all the quality of a half-remembered dream, as if the reality of it had been resorted symbolically during the night, encoded and dispatched to his unconscious. Grey thought of something that had happened a few years before: he had dreamed a friend of his had died, and for most of the following day he had felt a vague sense of sadness and loss until, midafternoon, he had realized that it was indeed only a dream, that his friend was alive and well. The feeling about their invisible visit was similar, although its cause was opposite: until reminded of it, Grey had remembered it in a dreamlike manner, his mood subtly affected by it, until the conscious realization that it had really happened.

It was curious that failure of memory surrounded invisibility.

Sue’s account of his lost period spoke of his own natural ability, his recognition of hers, the development of his skill at making himself invisible. But because of the bomb he had forgotten all this. Invisibility was a past, unremembered condition: Sue said that he no longer knew how, that her own talent had receded. Even Niall, supremely and terminally invisible, was not around any more.

And last night, intended to be Sue’s conclusive proof, had gone half forgotten until now.

Was amnesia inherently related to invisibility? Alexandra told him he had become invisible to her and Dr. Hurdis … but this was during the period of hypnosis he could not remember. Then there were the lost weeks of his life, invisible to him now, which he had replaced with spurious, confabulated memories. Was this not exactly the way in which ordinary people accounted to themselves for the presence of invisible people? Sue’s parents, bringing up a child they hardly saw, accounted for the mystery as a difficult daughter growing up and moving away. The unseen Niall, selfishly disrupting Sue’s visit home, was afterward given the benefit of the doubt and thought to be a nice young man. The soccer fans, deprived for a few minutes of their televised match, agreed among themselves that the game must have ended. The woman in the house acted as if the kitchen tap had somehow turned itself on, and later failed to see two strangers fornicating on her bed.

Sue had said that invisible people were made invisible by the people around them, their failure to notice: spontaneous amnesia, followed by confabulation to explain the inexplicable.

There was one experience of invisibility, though, that he could remember clearly, and this was the way it had sometimes helped his filming. But even this was in doubt.

Film crews feel vulnerable in dangerous circumstances. They are weighted down with bulky and valuable equipment, and they generally draw attention to themselves. People are always aware of the presence of cameras. Grey remembered that for a time there had been a problem with the security forces in Northern Ireland, who tried to discourage crews from visiting trouble spots because, it was claimed, the arrival of cameras often created or worsened an incident. Filming at night sometimes meant that lights had to be used, although high-speed stock had to a large extent averted that problem. Cameramen are usually in the thick of whatever is going on, because otherwise there is no point their being there, and if the story involves illegality or political dispute, the crews frequently become the targets of abuse or violence.

When Grey thought back to the reality of news filming as he had known it for several years, the idea of a cameraman working unnoticed was incredible. Yet the fact remained that there had been times when he had obtained footage in extreme situations. Sue’s interpretation had an odd plausibility, one that touched an inner instinct in him.

He simply did not know what to think.

After lunch Grey went for a walk by himself. Exercise for his hip was still essential, so he drove his car up to the West Heath near Hampstead and walked for a couple of hours through the oak forest. It was a small but attractive area, often neglected by visitors in favor of the more open main part of the Heath.

While he was there he came across a film crew from the BBC who were shooting some exterior action for a play. He recognized the cameraman, so he walked over and talked briefly between takes; Grey was now actively seeking work, and was not afraid to let it be known. The two men agreed to meet for a drink in a few days’ time.

He watched the unit at work for a while, wishing he were a part of it. The story was an episode from a thriller series, and the scene they were shooting involved two men chasing a blond actress through the trees. She was wearing a flimsy yellow dress, and between takes she stood with her boyfriend, shivering inside her coat and chain-smoking. She looked, off camera, utterly different from the frightened and vulnerable character she was playing.

Walking on, Grey thought about the one incident from the night before that had fundamentally affected his outlook. This was his discovery that Sue, when she thought herself invisible, became sexually highly charged. Because he had been there, had seen the change coming over her, had felt it too, he responded. He could still recall the urgent need. But it was an insight he had not expected; what he found attractive about Sue was what he had always thought of as her shyness, her modest dislike of being stared at, her physical neutrality. Sometimes in the past her lovemaking had been uninhibitedly coarse, and he had always believed that this was something he had brought out in her. Sexual knowledge is frequently revealing. But she had never been assertive in that way before. He was not repelled sexually, but it made him feel that until then he had perceived her wrongly.

That actress back there was in real life unlike the part she was playing. Sue, thinking herself unseen, switched from the role she habitually played to another character. She was two people: the woman he usually saw, and the one he had never seen until last night. In her invisibility, her concealment from the world, she had revealed herself. To Grey, it felt as if his other doubts coalesced around this. If the revelation had come earlier it might have made no difference, but at this late stage he felt unable to cope with yet another reversal.

By the time he returned to his car Grey had resolved not to see Sue again. They had an arrangement to meet in the evening, but he decided to call her as soon as he was home and cancel it. He drove back to his flat, thinking of what he would say to her. She was waiting for him, though, sitting on the steps of the small porch outside his front door.

VIII

In spite of his decision there was a part of him that remained pleased to see her. She kissed him warmly before they went inside, but Grey felt cool and resistant to her. Reluctantly he took her up to his flat, wondering how to broach the subject. He felt like a drink, so he took a can of lager from the refrigerator, but made some tea for Sue. He could hear her moving about restlessly in the front room as he drank some of the beer and waited for the kettle to boil.

When he took her the tea she was standing by the window, looking down into the street.

“You don’t want me here, do you?” she said.

“I was just about to give you a ring. I’ve been thinking—”

“I’ve come about something very important, Richard.”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“It’s about Niall.”

He put down her cup by the spare chair, noticing that she had brought with her a large manila envelope stuffed with papers. It was lying on the cushion of the chair. Outside in the street someone was trying to get a car going, the starter motor making a repeated nagging, whining sound. The noise always made Grey think of a sick animal, flogged endlessly by its unforgiving driver.

“There’s nothing else I want to know about Niall,” Grey said. He felt remote from her, the distance between them lengthening.

“I’ve come to tell you that Niall’s left me for good.”

“That’s not what you said yesterday. Anyway, I don’t care. Niall’s not the problem any more.”

“Then what is?”

“Everything that happened last night, everything you’ve ever said. I’ve had enough.”

“Richard, what I’ve come to say is there’s nothing left to come between us. It’s all over. Niall’s gone, I’ve lost the glamour. What more do you want?”

She stared at him across the room, looking helpless. Grey remembered suddenly how it had felt to love her, and he wished it were possible again. Outside, the irritating sound of the fruitless attempts to start the car came to an end. For the last minute or so the car battery had been running flat, the starter motor grinding with a pathetic, hopeless sound. Grey walked across to where Sue was standing and looked down into the street. He was always distracted by the sound of a car being started, because it crossed his mind that somebody might be interfering with his. He could see no one around, and his car was standing where he had parked it.

Sue took his hand. “What are you looking for?”

“That car being started … where is it?”

“Haven’t you been listening to me?”

“Yes, of course I have.”

She released his hand and went to sit down, moving the envelope to her lap. After looking up and down the street once more, Grey went to his chair.

Sue said, “Last night was a mistake, we both know that. It’ll never happen again. It can’t happen again. I’ve got to explain… . While I believed Niall was somewhere around I could still feel able to make myself invisible. But last night was wrong, something failed. I thought I was trying to prove invisibility to you, but really I was trying to prove to myself that Niall’s influence had left me. Now I’m sure of it.”

She held up the envelope for him to see.

“What’s that?” Grey said.

“It’s something Niall gave me, the last time I saw him.” She drew a breath, watching him. “He came to see me, gave me a newspaper which listed the names of the people injured by the car bomb. This was a few days afterward, long before you were transferred to Devon. At the same time he gave me this envelope. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t care. I never even opened it. I knew it was something of Niall’s, but by that time I was sick to death of him. But this morning I was thinking about last night, why it went wrong, and I knew Niall was somehow responsible. It felt, well, it was as if that part of my life no longer made sense without him. I remembered him giving me this, and I searched through my stuff until I found it. You ought to know what it is.”

“Sue, I’m just not interested in Niall.”

“Please at least look at it. It’s important.”

He took the envelope from her and pulled out what was inside. It was a sheaf of papers, handwritten, torn from the sort of writing pad found in any stationery shop; the left-hand side of each sheet was slightly corrugated where it had been ripped off. The top page was a brief note, written in the same hand as the rest. It said: Susan— Read this and try to understand. Goodbye—N.

The handwriting was legible, but it was distracting to look at because of the use of extravagant loops and curls. Periods and the dot above the letter “i” were drawn as minute circles. On most of the pages the color of the ink changed intermittently as different pens were used, but the most favored colors were green and radiant blue. Grey had no knowledge of graphology, but everything about the handwriting bespoke self-consciousness and a wish to seem prestigious.

“What is this? Did Niall write it all?”

“Yes … you ought to read it.”

“Now? While you’re sitting there?”

“At least look through it long enough to realize what it is.”

Grey set the note aside and read the first few lines at the top of the next page. They said:

The house had been built so that it overlooked the sea. Since its conversion to a convalescent hospital, two large wings had been added in the original style, and the gardens had been relandscaped so that patients wishing to move around were never faced with steep inclines.

“I don’t understand,” Grey said. “What’s this all about?”

“Look at it further on,” Sue said.

Grey put several of the pages on one side and read at random:

She tossed her hair back with a light shaking motion of her head and looked straight at him. He regarded her, trying to remember or see her as he might have done before. She held his gaze for a few moments, then cast her eyes downward once more.

“Don’t stare at me,” she said.

Grey said, beginning to feel confused, “This is a description of you, I think.”

“Yes, there’s some of that. Read more of it.”

He started turning the pages, picking out odd sentences to be read, constantly dazzled by the extraordinary handwriting and its elaborate curlicues. It was easier to skim than to read, but at another random he found:

Grey felt comfortable and relaxed and drowsy, but was still aware of all that was around him. He had his eyes closed and was listening to Dr. Hurdis, but he could also sense further. Outside in the hall two people walked past, talking to each other, and somewhere in the room Alexandra Gowers had made a clicking noise with a ballpoint pen, and rustled some paper.

Saying nothing to Sue, Grey turned the rest of the pages quickly. He knew what the writing said; the sense came through to him without having to read, because it was all familiar to him. There was not much farther to go. The text ended with the words:

Late, far later than he had expected, she called him from a pay phone. She had arrived at Totnes station, and was about to hire a taxi. She was with him half an hour later.

When she saw he had finished, Sue said, “Do you understand what it means, Richard?”

“What is this?”

“It’s Niall’s way of dealing with the inevitable. It’s a story, something he made up about us.”

“But why should he give it to you?”

“He wanted me to know. He wrote it to say that he finally accepted that I had finished with him, and wanted you.”

“This is what happened, though! How the hell could he have written it?”

“It’s just a story,” Sue said.

Holding the sheaf of papers in his hand, Grey slowly rolled them, making them into a short truncheon.

“But how did he know?” he said. “When did Niall give you this? You said it was just after the car bomb—but this is what really happened later!”

“I don’t understand it either,” Sue said.

“Niall didn’t make this up! He couldn’t have! He must have been there—all the time I was in hospital Niall was there too! That’s what this means. Don’t you see that?”

“Richard, that story’s been in my room for months.”

Suddenly Grey moved in his seat, looking wildly from side to side.

“Is Niall following us now? Is he here?”

“I told you, Niall is always here. Don’t let it matter.”

“He’s here now, Sue! He’s in this room!” Grey stood up, lurching on his weak hip, and took a clumsy step to the side. He flailed at the air with the papers in his hand. The beer can at his feet fell on its side, the frothy lager pouring in gulps onto the carpet. Grey swung about, groping with one hand at the air around him, prodding and punching with the rolled-up pages in his other fist. He moved awkwardly to the door, snatched it open to peer outside, then slammed it closed. He reached blindly for me as the air swirled about us both.

I stood back, keeping my distance, not wishing to be struck with a truncheon of my own making.

“Hold it!” I shouted, but of course you did not hear.

I heard Susan say, “Richard, you’re making a fool of yourself!” but neither of us paid her any attention. You were directly in front of me, balancing your weight on your good leg, your fist raised against me, your eyes in their desperation seeming to stare straight at me. I turned away from your disconcerting gaze, even though you would never be able to see me.

It has gone far enough. Here it ends.

Hold that position, Grey; nothing more is going to happen. Susan too; stay still!

I pause.

My hands are trembling. You scare me, Grey. We both threaten each other, you with your blundering ability to cause pain, I with my freedom to manipulate you. But now I am in control, and you can stay there as you are.

All right, Grey, let me tell you what you least wish to hear:

I am your invisible adversary and I am somewhere around you. You can never see me. I have been everywhere with you: I watched you at the hospital, I was there when Susan came to see you, I overheard what you said. I was in the South of France, I followed you about Wales, I have been with you in London. You have never been free of me. I have looked at you and listened to you; I know what you have done and everything you have thought. Nothing is private to you because I know you as well as you know yourself. I said I would fix you, Grey, and that is what I did.

I am everything you have ever feared. I am indeed invisible to you, but not in the sense you mean.

IX

Consider the room in which the three of us now find ourselves. We are in confrontation once more, facing up to each other ineffectually, and as ever failing to see. Yet there is a difference: you and Susan are both here, but I am not. I am no more here than I can be everywhere, because each is an absurdity.

Consider this room, the living room of your apartment.

I feel I know it intimately, although in reality I have never visited it. No matter; I can see it. I can move around it, walking or even drifting, look at it in its generality or inspect it in the closest detail. Here the white-painted walls that Susan so dislikes, covered with the cheap emulsion paint used by the builders who converted the house into flats; here the slightly worn carpet and furniture once owned by your parents. A television set in one corner, a layer of pale dust over the screen, a video recorder beneath it, the digital clock blinking on and off because you have never bothered to set it properly. I see a couple of bookshelves attached to one wall, and they are sagging in the middle because you or whoever put them up did not properly measure the distance between the brackets. I can scan along the shelves to look at your choice of books—some technical manuals, books of photography, a stack of glamour magazines, a random selection of paperback novels with broken spines—and I know you are not a serious reader except when you travel. On the sill against the window are the marks on the white paint where your houseplants stood; the sunlight has yellowed the paint except for five circular patches, themselves slightly marked by grains of dried potting compost. There is a faint smell of dust, also of damp. Your room speaks of transience, impermanence. I judge you are often away, that you do not feel settled or comfortable here even though you have owned the place for some time.

I know this room. I have inhabited it mentally from the day I first knew of you. It is real to me because this is how I have always visualized it, how I have imagined it when I have known you are here. I know the rest of the apartment in the same way, my interest in you extending to everything about you.

Your real life does not concern me, nor does the reality of where you might actually live. This is what I have created for you.

So here you are in this room, and Susan is with you. Both of you are motionless, because for the time being I have stilled you. Susan is sitting wide-eyed in the chair by the window, watching what you are trying to do. She has placed her canvas bag on the floor beside the chair and its strap snakes lightly over one of her feet. On the carpet in front of her is the opened envelope in which I had given her my story. A dark pooi of moisture lies in the weave of the carpet beside the overturned beer can. You are a few feet away from Susan, frozen in your aggressive search, just as you were when I decided to call a halt.

And I am here too, of course, although neither of you can see me.

What do you hope to achieve as you search for me? If you found me what would you do? Do you seek some kind of conclusion to all our wretched dealings? Surely I cannot matter to you anymore, as for weeks I have left you alone, or at least have left you alone as far as you were aware? You have stirred me from my quiescence by this sudden eruption of interest in me. Left to yourself, you had decided to break off your relationship with Susan. That suited me; only Susan concerns me, and as soon as you have finished with her I will be finished with you. So why should I matter to you anymore?

Yes, but Susan has shown you what I have written about you!

You clasp it in your hand, knowing that it describes you. It invalidates you, Grey. What you remember of the hospital now becomes false because I created it for you, and by extension it invalidates your memories of France, and by extension from that it invalidates everything else. You thought you could trust those memories because they have conviction, but I can tell you they have not.

Do you believe me? How good is your memory? Can you believe anything you remember or do you trust only what you are told?

We are all fictions—you, Susan, to a lesser extent myself. You are a fiction in the special sense of having been a different voice, which I used to speak for me. I have made you, Grey. You disbelieve in me, but not as much as I disbelieve in you. You are real enough in your own life, but when you impinged on mine I took you and used you. You are “real” only so far as it pleases me to make you seem “real,” and from the day you met Susan you gave me no pleasure.

Why should you resist this? We all make fictions. Not one of us is what we seem. We rearrange our memories to suit our present understanding of ourselves, not to account accurately for the past. When we meet other people we try to project an image of ourselves that will please or influence them in some way. When we fall in love we blind ourselves to what we do not wish to see.

The urge to rewrite ourselves as real-seeming fictions is present in us all: in the glamour of our wishes we hope that our real selves will not become visible.

This is all I have done. You are not you, but how I have made you seem to be. Susan is not Sue. I am not Niall, but Niall is a version of myself; once again I have no name. I am only I.

So you are denied the conclusion you thought you wanted. None of this tells you what you think you want to know, but I owe you no explanations. Susan has already told you the truth and you can and should believe her, even though I have taken her words and written them down myself. The facts in this are hers, but the fictions are mine.

What remains for you of Susan? Because I have frozen you in mid-action, and you cannot even turn your head, you will not see her as we leave. You will feel no bitterness at losing her—you have already reached your own decision about her. But I will ensure that you never see her again, because that much is in my power.

I could leave you here, stuck forever in this moment, a fiction abandoned without an ending … but that would not be right. Your own real life continues, and it is time I released you to that. Your life will now be tidy, your body will heal, matters will improve. I doubt you will every know why. You will forget, induce your own negative hallucination. You are no stranger to this, because for you forgetting is a way of failing to see.

X

The summer was hot that year, and with the breaking of the warm weather came the prospect of a full-time job for Richard Grey. His friend at the BBC put him in touch with the head of films at Ealing, the place where his film career had begun, and after an interview he was told that a staff job would be his from the first week in September.

Given the long summer to fill, Grey was stricken with his customary restlessness. He did a freelance camera job in Malta, but the trip was a short one and afterward he was more at a loose end than before. Cash compensation at last came through: it was less than he had expected, but more than enough to cover his immediate needs. Although he was no longer in pain and could use his hip normally, Grey bought a new car, one with automatic transmission. The old one had begun giving him trouble, starting with the annoyance of a flat battery. When Alexandra returned from Exeter to complete her dissertation, he waited around for a week or two, then suggested a holiday.

They took the new car across to France, driving slowly from place to place, following whim and a certain curiosity of memory. They visited Paris, Lyons, Grenoble, then drove south to the Riviera. It was still early in the summer, and the later crowds had not yet arrived. Grey found Alexandra’s company delightful, even though she was several years younger than he was. They never spoke of the past, or how they had met, or of anything that was not their immediate world of the holiday and each other. They spent a long time in the south, sunbathing, swimming, visiting museums and landmarks, touring around to see the sights. They visited SaintTropez only briefly, but here Grey came across a little shop that sold reproduction postcards. There was one he particularly liked: a photograph of the harbor while it was still used for fishing. He bought a copy of it for Sue. “Wish you were here,” he wrote, in a studiedly elaborate handwriting, and he signed it with an X.