The Affirmation

by Christopher Priest

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

  I said: “That was a honeysuckle.”

  “It was dead, whatever it was.”

  “Plants lose their leaves in winter,” I said. “It’s called nature.”

  “Then that proves it wasn’t a honeysuckle, because they’re evergreen.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “It would be nice to go up in the hills.”

  “James won’t drive up there in the snow.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I said: “I think I’ll go for a walk by myself.”

  “Don’t forget lunch. We’re going to look at the caves.”

  They headed off, content to be without me. James had a walking stick, and J
asper bounded around him.

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

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

  11

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

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

  Suddenly, I knew that Seri, by whom I tried to understand Gracia, had never existed. Gracia, holding me as tightly as I held her, defied definition. Gracia was Gracia: fickle, sweet-smelling, moody, unpredictable, funny. I could define Gracia only by being with her, so that through her I defined myself. I held her more tightly still, pressing my lips against her white neck, tasting her. The fur coat had opened as she raised her arms to take me, and I could feel her thin body through her blouse and skirt; she had been wearing the same clothes when I last saw her, at the end of the previous winter.

  At last I stepped back from her, but held her hands. Gracia stood looking down at the ground, then let go of my hands, blew her nose on a tissue. She reached into the car for her shoulder bag, then slammed the door. I held her again, arms around her back, but not pressing her to me. She kissed me, and we laughed.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” I said.

  “Neither did I. I didn’t want to, for a long time.”

  “Where have you been living?”

  “I moved in with a friend.” She had looked away, briefly. “What about you?”

  “I was down in the country for a time. I had to sort things out. Since then I’ve been with Felicity.”

  “I know. She told me.”

  “Is that why you—?”

  She glanced at James’s Volvo, then said: “Felicity told me you’d be here. I wanted to see you again.”

  Felicity had arranged the meeting, of course. After the weekend I had spent in Sheffield with Gracia, Felicity had gone out of her way to befriend her. But the two women were not friends, in the usual sense. Felicity’s gestures towards Gracia had been political, significant to me. She saw Gracia as a victim of my shortcomings, and helping Gracia was her way of expressing disapproval of me, and something more general: responsibility, and sisterhood between women. It was revealing that Felicity had not arranged the meeting at Greenway Park. She probably despised Gracia without knowing it. Gracia was just a wounded bird, someone to be helped with a splint and a spoon of warm milk. That I had done the wounding was where her concern began, naturally enough.

  We started walking into the village, holding hands and pressing shoulders, heedless of the cold and the wind. I had become alive in my mind, sensing a further move forward. I had not felt like this since before my father died. I had been obsessed with the past too long, too concerned with myself. All that I had been damming up in me now flowed towards an outlet: Gracia, part of my past yet returning.

  The main street of the village was narrow and winding, pressed in by the grey houses. Traffic went through noisily, throwing up fine spray with the tyres.

  “Can we find somewhere for coffee?” Gracia said. She had always drunk a lot of cheap instant coffee, made too weakly and with white sugar. I squeezed her hand, remembering a stupid argument.

  In a tiny side street we found a café, the front room of a terraced house, converted with a large pane of plate glass and metal topped tables. Little glass ashtrays rested exactly in the centre of each one. It was so quiet as we went in that I assumed the place was closed, but after we had been seated for a minute or two, a woman in a blue gingham kitchen overall came to take our order. Gracia ordered two poached eggs, as well as coffee; she had been driving since half-past seven, she said.

  “Are you still staying with your friend?” I said.

  “At the moment. That’s one of the things I want to talk to you about. I’ve got to move out soon, but there’s a place coming up. I want to know whether to take it or not.”

  “How much is it?”

  “Twelve pounds a week. Controlled rent. But it’s a basement, and not a very good area.”

  “Take it,” I said, thinking of London rents.

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” Gracia said, and stood up. “I’ll go now.”

  “What?”

  I watched her in amazement as she turned towards the door. But I had forgotten Gracia’s odd sense of humour. She leaned forward against the condensation-covered window, made a squiggle with her fingertip, then came back to the table. She ruffled my hair as she passed. Before sitting down again she shrugged off the fur coat and let it fall over the back of the chair.

  “Why didn’t you write to me, Peter?”

  “I did…but you never answered.”

  “That came too soon. Why didn’t you write again?”

  “I didn’t know where you were. And I wasn’t sure your flatmate was forwarding mail.”

  “You could have found me. Your sister did.”

  “I know. The real reason is…I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”

  “Oh, I did.” She had the ashtray in her fingers, turning it around. She was smiling slightly. “I think I wanted the chance to throw you out again. At least, I did at first.”

  “I really didn’t know how upset you were,” I said, and the devil of conscience reminded me of those hot summer days, obsessively writing about myself. I had had to put Gracia from my mind, I needed to find myself. Was this the truth?

  The woman came back then, and put down two cups of coffee. Gracia heaped in the sugar, stirred the liquid slowly.

  “Look, Peter, it’s all passed now.” She took my hand across the top of the table, gripping it firmly. “I got over it. I had a lot of problems, and it was difficult for a while. I needed a break, that’s all. I saw some other people, talked a lot. But I’m over it all now. What about you?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  The fact was that Gracia exerted an irresistible sexual influence over me. When we split up, one of the worst things about it was the thought of her in bed with someone else. She had often used that as an unstated threat, one used to hold us together yet one which eventually drove us apart. When I had finally convinced myself that we had reached the end, the only way I knew of coping was to close my mind to her. My possessiveness was irrational, because i
n spite of the sexual magnetism we had not often been good lovers for each other, but nonetheless my awareness of her sexuality pervaded everything I did with her and every thought I had of her. I was aware of it now, sitting there in the bleak café with her: the unbrushed hair, her loose and careless clothes, colourless skin, vagueness behind the eyes, tension within. Above all, perhaps, the fact that Gracia had always cared for me, even when I did not deserve it, or when her neuroses came like radio interference to our attempts to communicate.

  “Felicity said you weren’t well, that you’ve been acting strangely.”

  “That’s just Felicity,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Felicity and I don’t get on too well,” I said. “We’ve grown apart. She wants me to be like her. We’ve got different standards.”

  Gracia was frowning, looking clown at her cup of coffee.

  “She told me frightening things about you. I wanted to see you.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “No…just a part of it.”

  “What sort of things was she telling you?”

  Still avoiding my eyes, she said: “That you were hitting the bottle again, and not eating properly.”

  A sense of relief that that was all. “Does that seem as if it’s true?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look at me and tell me.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  She had glanced at me, but now she kept her eyes averted as she drained her cup. The woman arrived with Gracia’s eggs.

  “Felicity’s materialistic,” I said. “She’s full of wrong ideas about me. All I wanted to do after we split up was get away somewhere on my own, and try to work things out.”

  I stopped talking because I had suddenly been distracted by the kind of stray thought that had come so often in the last few weeks. I knew that I was not telling Gracia the whole story; somehow that kind of wholeness had been sucked out of me by my manuscript. Only there lay the truth. Would I one day have to show it to her?

  I waited while Gracia finished her meal—she ate the first egg quickly, then picked at the second; she had never had a long attention span for food—and then I ordered two more coffees. Gracia lit a cigarette. I had been waiting for that, wondering if she still smoked.