In the Memorial Room

by Frame, Janet

  —I thought she was quite tall.

  —She wasn’t, was she, George? Wasn’t Rose Hurndell thin and quite small?

  —Angela will be livid, George said, helping himself to a triangular bandage of bread packed with sardines.

  —I must be thinking of someone else. George says she was quite tall. One didn’t know, then, that she would be so famous. She was living with Louise Markham, a bit of an Amazon, don’t you think?

  —Her time is her own, I said slyly.

  —Time?

  Liz suddenly became agitated.

  —Both George and I have this feeling that time has cheated us.

  Instantly she seemed to regret what she was saying, at least to regret her expression of her feeling.

  She was about to say something further, then she sighed and said, vaguely, —You know.

  In the words she uttered, you know, she put, because she could not bear to say it, a feeling of nothingness.

  I did know.

  To have lived so long with time and to find, when one thought one had all the time in the world, that time had deserted, disappeared.

  I knew she did not mean to convey that time was short, that now they had retired they found themselves feeling their age and thinking of death and perhaps preparing for it and realising that their time on earth alive was almost finished. She meant that time had abandoned them, had been unfaithful in its myth which had given them faithful attendance as far as they could remember. There was no time now. Like a vanished occupant of a favourite chair, or room or seat in the sun, it left an emptiness which itself had become the intolerable if contradictory presence of nothingness. The lie had discovered them before they discovered the lie.

  —You do know, don’t you?

  I told her, yes, I did know.

  —And will you come to live in the apartment? You can catch the bus each day to the Memorial Room – I believe that a condition of the Fellowship is that you work in the room once or twice a week.

  —Yes. But I have somewhere to stay, thank you. I’ve moved to the Foster’s small villa.

  They were angry, as I had sensed that the Watercresses, the Markhams, had been angry.

  —Everyone is offering me a place to live, I said.

  —The others too? The Watercresses, the Markhams?

  —Yes.

  Liz frowned.

  —Angela will be livid, George said. Then he added, —Old, retired.

  11

  The library performed a similar function to the English church – it gathered together the exiles who had left England partly because they did not wish to be gathered together but who had changed their mind once they had arrived on the Côte d’Azur, settled in their retirement homes or apartments, redecorated and furnished the interior, cleaned up and planted the garden, and then sitting back to enjoy the arrival of the long-anticipated time for living, found that it was late, or it had been and gone, or it was only a dream. Instead, they saw the empty white winter sky, the bare hostile mountains, Italian and French, and another country’s ocean, and olive trees, palm trees, orchards lit with oranges and lemons, all of which they had known as visitors before they chose their place of retirement, and which they’d looked forward to seeing daily and possessing. Gradually they became aware of the changed relationship, of the intrusions of intimacy which adoption, of a person or a place, forced upon the new parent, of responsibilities and shames such as members of a family feel, of frustrations and longings for release that are part of the feeling towards a native land. And this, with no rescue or assistance from the benevolent promised time.

  It was at that stage the exiles began going to the church and the library and the British Association. They began ‘taking tea’ at four each day in one another’s homes. They drew apart from the French community and became a tolerated eccentric ‘little England’. No one should have been startled, on entering the English library between the hours of nine and eleven on Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday morning, to find a collection of elderly men and women fumbling their way through book titles on dimly lit shelves (The Egyptian Campaign, Italian Journey, The Great Generals and so on), while talking to one another in Oxford accents, dropping names and sentences like, ‘When I was at Magdalen’, ‘I knew him at Cambridge’, ‘The Vicar says…’, nor alarmed to hear an elderly man or woman exclaim, ‘Give me something light, a detective novel’ (from the rows and rows of much-read paperback crime fiction), ‘anything to pass the time. I just don’t want to think.’

  You’d have thought they would be thankful, as speaking of ‘passing the time’ showed that time was a reality, waiting for them; their problem, however, was to creep past in anonymity; they did not want, they could not bear to have the time for which they had made a contract with their leisure lives.

  Among the small company you’d usually find George and Liz Lee, Liz energetically behind the desk, checking books in and out, George writing out receipts for subscriptions; Haniel and Louise Markham, though Haniel was seldom at home and spent much of his time in Paris; Dorset and Elizabeth Foster who, however, were not regarded as ‘true’ members of the English community who, when speaking of them, added in a superior tone, ‘They’re New Zealanders’, which translated meant, ‘They’re not one of us’.

  Also, during the time I write of, you’d find the Watercresses in the library – Connie, Max, Michael and Grace, usually searching for information about a topic which Max or Connie or Michael or (less often) Grace had decided was worth writing an article about, and they must all four get down to it. Michael’s apprenticeship was being carefully encouraged. The Watercresses were not regarded as outsiders. They knew the members of the English community. They had visited the Côte d’Azur often. They had sent Michael to university at Aix-en-Provence to improve his French and soak up the French culture, and he had worked as a waiter at the Hotel Eugenia, in the tourist season. Also, they had founded the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship. And finally, they knew how to pronounce ‘Menton’. Elizabeth Foster, even as Rose Hurndell’s sister, did not have the prestige of the Watercresses.

  The person whose prestige most approached that of the Watercresses was the dead Rose Hurndell who could be talked about and quoted but not argued with. One knows that a tree sheds its leaves. In authorship, the author is not the tree scattering his books like leaves; the books are the tree; the author is shed, blown away, dies to make compost for other leaves and other trees. Rose Hurndell personally was decayed – the desolation of the Memorial Room was a memorial to her death. Her tree, her work, was beyond the reach of those who seek to prune or spray or retard blossom – but what shelter the tree was providing; and – who knows? – there might be golden fruit left, up there, away up near the sky, for the picking, solid gold fruit.

  —There’s always a chance, Connie had said, —we may find an unpublished manuscript.

  Between the Watercresses, the Fosters and the Markhams, there was rivalry approaching enmity. I sensed this more acutely one day when I was visiting the Watercresses in their apartment and Connie mentioned that they had been enquiring from the woman who, with her husband, ran the apartment. Indeed, her husband, an architect, had planned and built them, Roman style (they had a Latin name) centring on a courtyard with statues, a tangled garden, and a fountain which gave forth no water into an artificial pool which was empty. Some of the apartments opened on the rooftops trellised with vines and flowers; everything twined and blossomed. Connie had asked to see a small vacant apartment on the top floor, opening on to a vine-covered rooftop.

  —You must see it, she said. —It’s just the place for you. The rent is not very high.

  When Max came in from the kitchen where he’d been gloating over his newly bought marrons glacés and nut butter, Connie said, —Harry is thinking of taking that apartment on the top floor. You know, the one we looked at.

  Then, when Michael and Grace came into the sitting-room, Max said, —Harry’s going to be our neighbour.

  I waited until the excite
ment had died a little. Then I said very firmly, —The Foster’s place does me very well. I’m not inclined to move. Thanks all the same for enquiring about the place.

  —You won’t even look it over? I told the landlady about you. She’s very interested in writers.

  —No thanks, I said.

  Both Connie and Max flushed as if I said something which embarrassed them. I had rejected their advances.

  —That’s the third offer of accommodation I’ve had, I said. —Not counting the Fosters. The Markhams, the Lees, and now, you.

  —The Lees!

  They appeared shocked.

  At that moment, I think, their rivalry became enmity.

  12

  Have you sensed the nothingness of my nature, that I am as empty as the carriages of the trains that pass, dusty, used, in the morning sun? A novelist must be that way, I think, and not complain of it, otherwise how shall the characters accommodate themselves in his mind? To this you reply that it is he who must enter the minds of his characters? Certainly, but where shall he house them while he enters their minds, but in those empty used trains that pass and pass forever before his gaze? You see I have returned to the myth of the journey or rather to the myth that the frenzied molecular journey begins, goes somewhere, and ends, and vanishes; that metaphorical order must be imposed on the original invisible pattern of chaos. I must intrude language wherever I look and breathe, like the obsessive, trained resuscitator who seizes the inanimate to breathe life into it; or like the God who possessed this talent and, supposedly, used it.

  I had been in Menton for two months. It was now March. The winter in its final convulsive display of life had arrested all transport to and from the mountains and through the country. Deep drifts of snow, gales, high seas, floods, once again became the chief actors in the drama outlined, criticised and photographed by the newspapers; once again tenants were forced to leave their immobiliers, threatened by yet another déroulement. Snow, it was said, had never fallen so low on the slopes of the mountains, so near the sea, nor had so many pleasure-boats been lost on the Mediterranean, nor had the Mediterranean been so treacherous in its impulsive apparently changeling storms of no visible origin.

  Nor had the citrus crop been so abundant, and faithful in taste and colour. Behind special screens in the city’s garden square, preparations were being made for the annual lemon festival, the artistic display of lemons, oranges and all other fruits of the region; everyone waited anxiously for the counterfeit winter to admit its nature; on the slopes and in the valleys of the mountain, the arrière-pays, the scent of the flowering mimosa hung in the air; the grey lavender buds began to open even from as low as the rock where they grew, to prepare the change in the colour of the sky that in three, four, five weeks would be challenged, rivalled, enhanced in its colour by the blossoming trees and flowers.

  Everywhere, every year there is weather described as unusual, not by the visitors but by those who know best, the inhabitants. The old blind man, one hundred and fifteen years old, who lived away up in the mountain village of Sainte-Agnès and spent his day, if the weather were fine, on the stone seat in the sun outside his small house, watching the people, mostly tourists, come and go through the narrow cobbled streets, was reported as saying he had never known the snow so deep. He was not afraid to go out in it, he said; indeed, on the day he was interviewed by the newspaper, on his birthday, he was standing out in the snow, with an old straw hat pulled tightly over his blind eyes, wearing a bright blue nylon raincoat (buttoned), though he nevertheless kept raising his face to the light. The winter had been terrible, he said, authoritatively from his one hundred and fifteen years. And he knew. He might be blind – the bandits had come from the mountains, attacked him and blinded him, his family had descended upon him and carried off all his belles choses – but he knew how to assess the seasons from one year to another. His authority gave the city a sudden sense of pride in the unusual weather. The mayor, on a visit to Paris, remarked about it to a newspaper reporter and his remark appeared in both a morning and an evening Paris newspaper and was reflected back to the local Nice-Matin, like the effortless journey of a satellite swinging – as far as we on earth know – soundlessly through space.

  Then, suddenly, for the opening of the lemon festival, the sun shone, the snow melted, and people flocked to the city – very old mountain-people, their mountain gait strangely unbalancing them on the wide, level promenade; guests from the many villas, pensions and hotels; visitors in fast cars from Italy and north and west of Monte Carlo, the rich-looking famous and the famous-looking rich, the unsuntanned and the suntanned; and the crooks, les escrocs, the pick-pockets, malfaiteurs, cambrioleurs.

  On the days of the festival I left my work and wandered through the crowds. I was beginning to see a pattern in the systematic extinction of myself; I do know that patterns, in madmen or novelists, are enveloping shapes and powers; consequently I had a sense of oppression which was lightened by my meeting again Haniel and Louise Markham. Haniel, although younger than Louise, appeared so much older because of his frailty and apparent ill health. His face was very pale, his skin finely drawn, taut across his cheekbones. Louise was another woman of the ‘eager’ breed, with an accent not markedly English, and a conversation full of questions about the habits and lives of people living in the neighbourhood, which made her a gossip rather than an anthropologist. A rather rusted sensitivity served to bar her progression into tactlessness. I accepted the invitation to their nearby apartment for tea, and, as we moved up like kitchen parcels in the openwork iron lift, past the wide marble staircases, they asked me had I considered their offer of the small apartment downstairs.

  Thanking them again I said that I was comfortable where I was now living but that if it should be necessary I would consider their offer.

  The apartment, which I’d seen first on a bright day, now appeared heavily draped and dark with its maroon curtains and cushions and deep armchairs and dark-stained furniture. The bookshelves lining the walls were filled to overflowing; books lay everywhere on the coffee tables and corner tables: new books, with no price or name inside; some, I could tell, had been ‘sent’ without being asked for; others had been ‘ordered’ from England; others were presents from Louise to Haniel and Haniel to Louise.

  —Haniel was at Oxford with Rose Hurndell’s publisher, Louise said, as if to explain the link between the Markhams and their books.

  —We are great readers ourselves, of course.

  —Will you have China tea or Indian tea?

  —Please, China.

  —I always ask.

  Haniel sat by me on the long sofa. When the tea was made, Louise sat opposite, the tray poised in her hand, unable to find a space among the books to set it down. I leaned forward, lifting clear Virginia Woolf’s Life and D. H. Lawrence’s letters and an old book, with the leaves drifting out, called Mentone. I glanced at one of the photos; it was of a scarcely inhabited coast with the sea directly washing at the base of the mountains, not, as it now was, driven back by reclaimed land that formed a promenade.

  The sea would have had much forgiving to do, were it human. The mountains also, deprived of the satisfying completeness of salty bathing and snowy crowning.

  —That’s a very old book, Louise said with some satisfaction.

  We began drinking our tea.

  —Now tell me, Louise said, a small juice of curiosity gathering about her lips – both she and Haniel, as some people do, like dogs, only more discreetly, seemed to be much of the time in a state of salivation. (It happens with advancing age, of course – what in adolescence is tears found on the pillow when waking, becomes a pool of saliva spilled from a long-used and tired mouth.)

  —Tell me, what are you working on?

  —Some work, I said dully.

  —Have you got your theme yet? You do set it round a theme, don’t you?

  Living within the myth and surrendering to metaphor I could not quite decide whether getting one’s theme was the eq
uivalent of getting one’s wisdom teeth, or a parcel in the mail, or perhaps a bill one couldn’t pay – I worked on it, though, for several seconds before I replied,

  —Well, it’s –

  —Oh, you haven’t. I see.

  She had not expected me to have my theme. There was nothing about me to persuade her that I was a writer.

  Haniel sat silent. He kept making a twitching movement with his long pale nose; I could see the mark made by his glasses, though he was not wearing glasses then; the movement seemed designed to shake his glasses from his nose. The old age of the mouth and the eyes, I thought.

  Louise turned the conversation, with some relief, to Rose Hurndell.

  —We tried to buy the Villa Florita, you know. It is not for sale. You know I helped to look after Rose.

  —Did she need looking after?

  —She had a limp. She walked with a stick.

  —She was not ill, though.

  —Oh no. We never guessed.

  —And you were down here alone looking after her? I said, as the novelists say, ‘lightly’ which really means with some heaviness of meaning.

  She looked across at Haniel. He was indeed a silent man; he had scarcely spoken. Now he looked at Louise as if to say, you know best, then he said, —Yes, Louise came here with Rose. I stayed in Oxford.

  —I told you that Haniel knew Rose Hurndell’s publisher?

  She knew she had told me. She appeared to be worried by her husband’s silence and was trying to force him to speak.

  —Tell Harry about him.

  —There’s not much to say. A very unpleasant man. Very pale face, bright eyes, dramatic manner. They say he changed some of her letters to make them more dramatic.