The Affirmation

by Christopher Priest

  I said then: “Why couldn’t you have seen me last year? After the row?”

  “Because I couldn’t, that’s all. I’d had enough and it was still too soon. I wanted to see you but you were always so critical of me. I was just demoralized. I needed time to put things right.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said those things.”

  Gracia shook her head. “They don’t mean anything now.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “I’ve sorted things out. I told you, I’m feeling a lot better.”

  “Have you been with another guy?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it matters. I mean, it would have mattered.” I sensed myself heading into danger, disrupting something.

  “I was with someone for a while. It was all last year.”

  Last year: the words made it sound as if it was a long time ago, but last year was still only three weeks ago. Now it was I who looked away. She knew the irrationality of my possessiveness.

  “He was just a friend, Peter. A good friend. Someone I met who’s been looking after me.”

  “Is that who you’re still living with?”

  “Yes, but I’m moving out. Don’t be jealous, please don’t be jealous. I was on my own, and I had to go into hospital, and when I came out you weren’t there, and Steve came along just when I needed him.”

  I wanted to ask her about him, but at the same time I knew I wanted to ask to stake territory, not to hear answers. It was stupid and unfair, but I resented this Steve for being who he was, for being a friend. I resented him more for arousing in me an emotion, jealousy, that I had tried to rid myself of. Leaving Gracia had purged me of that, I thought, because only with her had it been so acute. Steve became in my mind everything I was not, everything that I could never be.

  Gracia must have seen it in my eyes. She said: “You’re being unreasonable about this.”

  “I know, but I can’t help it.”

  She put down her cigarette and took my hand again.

  “Look, this isn’t about Steve,” she said. “Why do you think I’ve come here today? I want you, Peter, because I still love you in spite of everything. I want to try again.”

  “I do too,” I said. “But would it go wrong again?”

  “No. I’ll do anything to make it work. When we split up, I realized that we had to go through all that to be sure. It was me that was wrong before. You made all that effort, trying to repair things, and all I did was destroy. I knew what was happening, I could feel it inside me, but I was obsessed with myself, so miser able. I started to loathe you because you were trying so hard, because you couldn’t see how awful I was being. I hated you because you wouldn’t hate me.”

  “I never hated you,” I said. “It just went wrong, again and again.”

  “And now I know why. All those things that caused tension before, they’re gone. I’ve got a job, somewhere to live, I’m back in touch with my own friends. I was dependent on you for everything before. Now it really is different.”

  More different than she knew, because I had changed too. It seemed she possessed all the things that once were mine. My only possession now was self-knowledge, and that was on paper.

  “Let me think,” I said. “I want to try again, but…”

  But I had lived for so long with uncertainty that I had grown used to it; I rejected Felicity’s normality, James’s security. I welcomed the unreliability of the next meal, the morbid fascinations of solitude, the introspective life. Uncertainty and loneliness drove me inwards, revealed me to myself. There would be an imbalance between Gracia and myself again, of the same type but weighted the opposite way. Would I cope with it any better than she had?

  I loved Gracia; I knew it as I sat with her. I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone, including myself. Especially myself, because I was explicable only on paper, only by fictionalization and faulty memory. There was a perfection to myself as shaped by the manuscript, but it was the product of artifice. I had needed to re-invent myself, but I could never have invented Gracia. I remembered my faltering attempts to describe her through the girl, Seri. I had left out so much, and in making up for the omissions I had made her merely convenient. Such a word could never be applied to Gracia, and no other would describe her exactly. Gracia resisted description, whereas I had defined myself with ease.

  Even so, making the attempt had served its purpose. In creating Seri I had failed, but then I had discovered something else. Gracia was affirmed.

  Minutes passed in silence, and I stared at the table-top as I felt my complicated emotions and feelings turn within me. I experienced again the same sort of instincts that had driven me to my first attempt at the manuscript: the wish to straighten out my ideas, to rationalize what perhaps would be better left unclear.

  Just as from now I should always be a product of what I had written, so too would Gracia be understood through Seri. Her other identity, the convenient Seri of my imagination, would be the key to her reality. I had never been fully able to understand Gracia, but from now Seri would be there to make me recognize what I did comprehend of her.

  The islands of the Dream Archipelago would always be with me; Seri would always haunt my relationship with Gracia.

  I needed to simplify, to let the turbulence subside. I knew too much, I understood too little.

  At the heart of it all was an absolute, that I had discovered I still loved Gracia. I said to her: “I’m really sorry everything went wrong before. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Well, it was.”

  “I don’t care about that. It was my fault too. It’s all in the past.” Distractingly, the thought came that it too, the split-up, had been somehow defined by my writing. Could it all have been as easy as that? “What are we going to do now?”

  “Whatever you like. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I’ve got to get away from Felicity,” I said. “I’m only staying with her because I’ve nowhere else to go.”

  “I told you I’m moving. This week, if I can manage it. Do you want to try living with me?”

  As I realized what she had said I felt a thrill of sexual excitement; I imagined lovemaking again.

  “What do you think about that?” I said.

  Gracia smiled briefly. We had never actually lived together, although at the height of the relationship we would often spend several consecutive nights together. She had always had somewhere of her own to stay, and I had mine. In the past we had resisted the idea of moving in together, perhaps because both of us feared we might tire of each other. In the end it had taken less than that to split us up.

  I said: “If I lived with you because I had nowhere else to go, it would fail. You know that.”

  “Don’t think of it like that. It invites failure.” She was leaning towards me across the table, and our hands were still clenched. “I’ve worked this out on my own. I came up here today because of what I decided. I was stupid before. It was my fault, whatever you say. But I’ve changed, and I think you’ve grown too. It was only selfishness that made me react away from you before.”

  “I was very happy,” I said, and suddenly we were kissing, reaching awkwardly towards each other across the table-top. We upset Gracia’s coffee cup, and it fell on the floor, breaking into pieces. We started trying to mop up the spilled coffee with paper serviettes, and the woman came with a cloth. Later, we walked through the cold streets of Castleton, then followed a path that led up one of the hills. When we had climbed for about a quarter of an hour we came to a place above the tree line where we could see down over the village. In the car park the back door of the Volvo was open. A few more cars had driven in since we were there, and these were parked in a line beside it. Amongst them was Gracia’s; she had told me she could drive, but in all the time I had known her she had never owned a car.

  We stared down at Felicity’s little family group huddled around their car.

  Gracia said: “I don’t really want to meet
Felicity today. I owe her too much.”

  “So do I,” I said, knowing it was true, yet nevertheless continuing to resent her. I would as soon never see Felicity again, so troubled were my feelings about her. I remembered James being smug, Felicity being patronizing. Even as I took advantage of them, and sponged off Felicity, I resented everything they stood for and rejected anything they offered me.

  It was cold on the hillside, with the wind curling down from the moors above, and Gracia held close to me.

  “Shall we go somewhere?” she said.

  “I’d like to spend the night with you.”

  “So would I…but I haven’t any money.”

  “I’ve got enough,” I said. “My father left me some, and I’ve been living off it all year. Let’s find a hotel.”

  By the time we had walked down to the village, Felicity and the others had gone off again. We wrote a note and left it under the windscreen wipers, then drove to Buxton in Gracia’s car.

  The following Monday I went with Gracia to Greenway Park, collected my stuff, thanked Felicity effusively for everything she had done for me, and left the house as quickly as I could. Gracia waited in the car and Felicity did not go out to see her. The atmosphere in the house remained tense all the time I was there. Resentments and accusations were suppressed. I had a sudden, eerie feeling that this would be the last time I should ever see my sister, and that she knew it too. I was unmoved by the idea, yet as we drove down the crowded motorway to London my thoughts were not of Gracia and what we were about to start, but of my ungracious and inexplicable resentment of my sister. I had my manuscript safe in my holdall, and I resolved that as soon as I had the time in London I would read through the sections dealing with Kalia, and try to understand. As we drove along it seemed to me that all my weaknesses and failings were explained to me in the manuscript, but that in addition there were clues to a new beginning.

  I had created it by the force of imagination; now I could release that imagination and channel it into a perception of my life.

  Thus, it seemed to mc now that I was moving from one island to another. Beside me was Seri, behind me were Kalia and Yallow. Through them I could discover myself in the glowing landscape of the mind. I felt that at last I saw a way to free myself from the confinements of the page. There were now two realities, and each explained the other.

  12

  The ship was called Mulligayn, a name which we could trace to neither geography, personality nor reason. Registered in Tumo, she was an elderly, coal-burning steamer, given to rolling in the mildest swell. Unpainted, uncleaned and lacking at least one of her lifeboats, the Mulligayn was typical of the hundreds of small passenger ships that linked the populous southern islands of the Archipelago. For fifteen days Seri and I sweltered in her airless cabins and companionways, grumbling at the crew because it was expected of us, although privately neither of us felt we had much to complain about.

  Like my earlier voyage to Muriseay, this second leg of the journey was in part a discovery of myself. I found that I had already absorbed some island attitudes; an acceptance of crowding, and of general uncleanliness, and of late ships and unreliable telephones and corruptible officials.

  I frequently remembered the saying I had heard from Seri, the first time we met: that I would never leave the islands. The longer I stayed in the Archipelago the more I understood it. I still had every intention of going back to Jethra, regardless of whether or not I took the Lotterie treatment, but with every day that passed I felt the rapture of islands grow within me.

  Because I had lived all my life in Jethra I accepted its values as the norm. I never saw the city as prim, old-fashioned, conservative, over-legislated, cautious and inward-looking. I had simply grown up in it, and although I was aware of its faults as well as its virtues, its standards had become my own. Now that I had left, now that the happy-go-lucky outlook of many islanders was becoming something I liked, I wanted to experience more of the culture, become a small part of it.

  As my perceptions changed, the thought of returning to Jethra became less and less attractive. I was enthralled by the Archipelago. On one level, travelling around the islands was undoubtedly a bore, but the constant knowledge that there was going to be another island, somewhere else to visit and explore, opened broad internal vistas in me.

  During the long voyage to Collago, Seri told me about the effect the Covenant of Neutrality had had within the Archipelago. The Covenant was the invention of governments in the north, imposed on the islands from without. It enabled both warring factions to use the Archipelago as an economic, geographic and strategic buffer against the other side, distancing the war from their own territories by adventurism in the great empty continent to the south.

  Once the Covenant had been signed, a sense of timelessness and apathy had descended on the Archipelago, sapping cultural energy. The islanders had always been racially and culturally distinct from the people in the north, although trading and political links went back as far as could be remembered. But now the islands were isolated. It affected Archipelagan life on every level Suddenly there were no new Elms from the north, no books, he cars, virtually no visitors, no steel or grain or fertilizer, no oil or coal, no newspapers or academics or expertise or industrial equipment. The same sanctions closed the islands’ only export markets. All the dairy produce of the Torqui Group, the fishing, the timber, the minerals, the hundreds of different types of arts and crafts, no longer had the mass consumer markets of the north open to them. Obsessed with its local squabble, the northern continent closed its doors to the rest of the world, and it did so because it considered itself to be the world.

  The worst effects of the Covenant had been felt in the years immediately following it. Both it and the war had by now become a part of everyday life and the Archipelago was beginning to recover, both economically and socially. Seri told me there had been a noticeable change of mood in recent years, a reaction against the north.

  A kind of pan-islandic nationalism was growing in the Archipelago. There had been a renewal of religious faith, for one thing, a sweeping evangelism that was taking worship to the Orthodox cathedrals as never before in the last thousand years. In step with this there had been a secular revival: a dozen new universities had been built or were in the process of construction, and more were planned. Tax revenue was being put into the new industries appearing to replace the imported goods. Major discoveries of oil and coal had been made, and counter-Covenant offers of assistance or investment from the north had been pointedly turned down. Arising with this was a new emphasis on the arts md agriculture and the sciences: investment and grant money was obtainable with a minimum of bureaucratic delay. Seri said she knew of dozens of new settlements on previously uninhabited islands, each pursuing a way of life centred on their own interpretation of what cultural independence really meant. For some it was an artists’ colony, for others, subsistence farming; others, an opportunity to experiment with lifestyles, educational programmes or social structures. All were united, though, by the renaissance spirit, and by a common instinct to prove to themselves, and to anyone else who cared to inquire, that the old hegemony of the north was at an end.

  Seri and I intended to become two of those who would inquire. Our plan, after Collago, was to go island-hopping for a long time.

  Before all this, standing in the way, was Collago. The island where living was bestowed, where life was denied. I had still not decided what to do.

  We were following one of the main sea-lanes between Muriseay and Collago, and so it was inevitable that other lottery winners would be aboard. I was unaware of the others at first, preoccupied with Seri, watching the islands, but after a couple of days it was obvious who they were.

  They had formed a clique, the five of them. There were two men and three women, all of an age; I judged the youngest, one of the men, to be in his late fifties. They were invulnerable in their conviviality, eating and drinking, filling the first-class lounge with jollity, often drunk but a
lways tiresomely polite. Once I started watching them, fascinated in a rather morbid way, I kept willing them to break out, perhaps to swing a punch at one of the stewards or eat to such excess that they would be sick in public; already, though, they were superior beings, above such veniality, humble in their imminent role of demi-gods.

  Seri had recognized them from the office, but she said nothing to me until I had worked it out for myself. Then she confirmed it. “I can’t remember all their names. The woman with the silver hair, she’s called Treeca. I quite liked her. One of the men is called Kerrin, I think. They’re all from Glaund.”

  Glaund: the enemy country. There was enough of the north still in me to think of them as foes, but enough of the islands to recognize the instinct as irrelevant. Even so, the war had been going on for most of my life, and I had never before left Faiandland. We sometimes saw propaganda films in Jethran cinemas about the Glaundians, but I had never given them much credence. Factually, the Glaundians were a fairer-skinned race than mine, their country was more industrialized and they had a history of being territorially ambitious; less authentically, they were supposed to be ruthless businessmen, indifferent sportsmen and incompetent lovers. Their political system was different from ours. While we lived under the benevolent feudalism of the Seignior, and the whole impenetrable apparatus of the Tithe Laws, the Glaundians operated a system of state socialism, and were supposed to be socialized equals.

  These five appeared not to recognize me as being one of them, which suited me. I was disguised from them by my youth, and by the fact I was with Seri. To them we must have seemed to be mere drifters, island-hoppers, young and irresponsible. None of them seemed to recognize Seri without her uniform. They were wrapped up in themselves, united in their impending athanasia.