by Frame, Janet
—Oh?
—She wasn’t a letter-writer at all, you know. If it weren’t for the interest in her – it accumulates with each article about her, each book about her books – but oh! her letters are full of grocery lists and prices and buying things; most unpoetic.
Louise Markham had succeeded in making her husband join the conversation. He twitched his nose violently and said, —Do you know, a letter of Rose Hurndell’s was sold at Sotheby’s recently – I forget how much, several thousand – it was a letter to a travel agent wanting to book for the ferry and train to Menton! That’s all. Nothing else. It’s madness.
—Of course it is, dear.
Haniel smiled a frail smile.
I thought, perhaps it was his time to sleep; that I had better leave.
Just as I was leaving, Louise made as if to keep me in the room.
—You must take some books, she said. —We insist.
I did not need persuasion.
They heaped books upon me (lent only), like many tasteful beautiful bonds, pulled tightly, and as I was standing by the liftwell waiting for the open-work lift to receive me, they asked, as if exploring another reserve of power, —Is your health good?
The fact that I was descending rather than rising, robbed my hearty Yes of its conviction.
I almost said, as I moved through the eerie dark mass between floors, —Very well, thank you, but I am going blind.
13
If I were to describe my state during the next month at Menton, I should say that I had ‘settled’. I worked a little each day, I ate a modest lunch in one of the promenade cafés, looking out at the usually stormy sea, I took my afternoon promenade with the citizens and visitors, the middle-aged, the old and the sick in wheelchairs or leaning on walking-sticks and crutches; at times someone so thin, so pale, so moribund passed that I fancied it might be Death himself out for a stroll by the Mediterranean – keeping an eye on his prospects.
Then, after my walk, I’d return to tidy the villa, write letters, read, then spend the evening either alone or with the Fosters, the Lees, the Markhams, the Watercresses old and young, going from one to another as each invited me: it was a settling-in period similar to the commencement of hibernation, I imagine. That month of March, following the wild storms, an oppressive stillness settled over the city and the mountains; there was not breeze enough to stir the sensitive palm leaves; no trees moved; the dead leaves that a month ago had rushed in whirlwinds on the footpaths and the yards, crackling like footsteps day and night, were shored up one upon the other in sleep. Day by day the camions with their poids lourd breathed the polluting fumes into the air. People in the streets and on the promenades looked tired, as if they had not been sleeping well in a world so still. The tiredness would be accentuated when from time to time a cold damp presence arrived from the mountains and winter furs once again were brought out and worn.
That month of March was vigil weather. The expressions on the faces of the people reminded me of the expressions imagined on the faces of those on land waiting for news of those at sea; people scanned the sky, the sea, the mountains, and the faces of others, to try to read the news or to find when it would at last be given. The Festival was over. The strangers had gone. The town, although not empty, had an air of desolation. The thousands of fires of the oranges and lemons – so proudly lit and displayed in the garden square, as suns attended and grown in the earth, by those who might have imagined they had no need of sky-sun – were extinguished. On display for at least six weeks, battered by the storms, the fruit-fires that survived as fruit only were sold in an atmosphere so much in contrast to their late glory that one felt a sense of humiliation such as one feels outside the Casino at Monte Carlo, seeing the furtive notices in the upper-storey windows of some buildings – Money advanced for Jewels. There was a feeling that not only the fruit but the sky-sun itself had been robbed of its dignity, forced to sell itself out to keep up appearances. Does one become anthropomorphic over oranges and lemons? This time of oppressive stillness, of tiredness, of waiting, was made more a time of cruelty by the dispersal for money of the once proudly constructed sun.
People were saying, too, that the oranges and lemons in the festival were always especially bitter, and it was not civic pride which kept the exhibits intact throughout the festival, it was a simple human dislike of bitter-tasting fruit.
The town was waiting. I did not realise that I too was taking part in the waiting until coming home to my villa, my sanctuary, one afternoon I found a workman’s truck outside the front door, the front door wide open, and sounds of workmen hammering, tramping about, coming from inside.
Elizabeth Foster and Dorset Foster came to the door.
—Oh, Harry. We hope you don’t mind. Is the place comfortable for you?
—Of course, I said. —I have everything.
They smiled with delight.
—We want you to have more. More of everything. We’re putting in another heater. Just think of that. And hot water both upstairs and downstairs. And we’re making a bath downstairs as well as upstairs. We’ll install a new electric meter, to take the load. And you need a larger stove, instead of that cooking plate. We’d always wanted to make a few alterations but there seemed to be little purpose in doing them just for ourselves – we needed someone like you to get us going. You understand?
—Yes, I said, I understood.
—Now, you’ll be here six months, Elizabeth said. —In six months we can have everything fixed up, including a new roof. We need a new roof.
—It will take six months, then? I asked, trying to grasp the idea that the sanctuary for which I had already paid six months’ rent in advance was to be disturbed.
—Oh yes, six months at least, for the alterations. Don’t you think so, Dorset?
Dorset stared at me a moment, and I swear he had the look of a tailor who is trying to judge approximately your size before he begins to measure and cut – the cloth only, it is to be hoped, not the person who will wear the suit.
—Six months, yes, he said.
I felt, although he was sympathetic to me, he and Elizabeth were driven in this by a joint power against which I’d have no defence.
—What about my writing? I said boldly.
As I said at the beginning of my story I’ve never been a person who speaks up, and others have condemned me for it, for my easy-going nature, my tolerance amounting to weakness and described by others and myself in moods of exasperation as spinelessness, a description which man only and not an invertebrate looks on as an insult.
—Oh, we’ll move you from room to room. We promise we won’t disturb you. We’ll be as quiet as mice and we’ll tell the workmen that you’re writing and want absolute silence, and there’s plenty of room in the house for you to find a little corner of your own; that tiny desk we made for you will fit in anywhere, you’ll be surprised.
I wanted to shout suddenly, —But I’m going blind!
Instead I asked Elizabeth if she’d ever thought of doing writing, like her sister Rose.
—Not anymore, she said. —I’m here – we’re here – more or less to guard Rose’s interests, not in a material way, in a memorial way, to straighten out rumours and so on. Our interest now is the two houses, to create something from them. I suppose if one were not being modest one would talk of it as making a work of art.
—Just as important in its way as Rose Hurndell’s poems, I said, ingratiatingly, meaning at first to make an ironical remark but finding it came out without irony, almost with deference.
—You see, Dorset. Just what I told you, Elizabeth said. —Rose just happens to have written poems while I have chosen my own medium. Rose, for instance, could not have painted that sitting-room wall.
There was a pointlessness about the conversation which enticed me to continue it.
—You mean the white wall in the sitting-room?
—The white wall in the sitting-room.
I almost shouted suddenly, —But I’m goi
ng blind!
The workmen appeared at the door. They wanted instructions about where to put the new electric stove.
Excusing myself, I went out of the house and down the avenue to the beachfront and the promenade. It was too early for bathers but there were many people sitting on the seats watching the waves and the black-headed gulls riding again and again the large waves, and the camions tipping their loads of soil to make the reclamation for the new restaurant in time for the summer opening. The soil surged from the truck, some falling into the water, colouring the waves, the colour spreading along the waterfront so that the inner waves were clay-coloured, the outer waves the azure so proudly talked of and written of.
I sat on one of the seats. I felt homeless. The Fellowship tasted, not bitter, but sour in my mind. The springtime sky was blue, the distant mountains white with rock and sun. The waiting was over. I remembered a song we used to sing at school:
The glow of evening tints the bay
where cloudlets kiss the sea.
A tiny boat so far away
is sailing home to me,
is sailing home to me.
O haste thee home the sailor cries
I’m waiting on the shore,
Haste oh haste my heart it cries
the waiting days are o’er,
the waiting days are O’ER.
The final line was sung in three parts: by those boys whose voice had changed, the girls and the boy sopranos, while at the end of the song the teacher, a woman, let out a long plaintive note, to the words the waiting days are o’er while we echoed her note, after which she (conducting the while) suddenly snapped her hand across her face as if to break the spell, signalled to the boy who was playing the piano (he would go far, they said, and eventually he went as far as the corner where he bought a garage, as he was an excellent mechanic) who also stopped abruptly.
Then in a talking voice which sounded strange unaccompanied, —Take out your silent reading books.
So I remember this. And why not, in the land of Proust: Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.
And so, also, day after day, the alterations continued. Unable to work in the Memorial Room or the small villa, I spent my time roaming between the two, and hoping before I reached one, then the other, that I would find the retreat and silence I told myself I needed in order to think and write.
One day, a new stove, with a see-through oven, warming drawer, thermostatic control, light control and so on, was installed. Then I’d walk to the Memorial Room and sit in the tangled garden listening to the chuckling birds who knew about everything. Then I’d return to the villa to find workmen drilling holes in the wall to put in power points.
—Oh, we must have new power points. We haven’t enough power, they cried, who were effectively controlling my every move.
Another day – new cutlery, new plates, a new set of cups. A hot water cylinder, a new bath, a new reading lamp.
—You will want for nothing, they said.
I still had not told them of my prospective blindness; perhaps I did not myself believe it, for I had had a kind of obsession about blindness for many years, and even in my first two historical novels I took care to have at least one character (not fictional) who was blind; I tended, at times, to look on my preoccupation with blindness as an artistic device, like the blind man in a Greek play, or the old man or the fool in Shakespeare: the frenzied blind man who waves his stick and shouts, because he senses it, the danger that lies ahead. Even my parents – and my father a doctor, too – looked on my recent problems with my eyes as something that would ‘pass’. No one in our family has been blind. They tend to deafness. Again, I was following a convention in not concerning myself with deafness, for even though a hearing aid may be visible, deafness has an infuriating secrecy about it, and it is harder to identify with the deaf; it is easier to make them the subject of humour, to make their comic mishearing of speech into a satire on human communication; and, as those who are disabled tend to do, they use the power which they find in their disability to surround themselves with an antidote to endearment. A hearing aid arouses less sympathy than a white walking-stick. In a way, by turning to blindness, or being directed towards it, I was following a similar path to those around me whom I was beginning to condemn both for their romantic notions of writers living and dead and for their uncontrollable desires to seek shelter and permanence in the dead and the work of the dead. Being in France, I was reminded of the scene from Victor Hugo’s ‘The Retreat from Moscow’ where those who were victorious simply by their being alive could remain alive only if they sought shelter from the blizzard by creeping within the bloated hollows of the dead horses.
A fancy, certainly, to talk of Rose Hurndell as a horse, but I had seen her described as one, and written of as one, by a poet who had known her. ‘And there was a horse in the King’s stables: and the name of the horse was, GENIUS’, was his prefaced quote from The Arabian Nights.
There came a time when the alterations were being made everywhere except in the small solarium-corridor between the bathroom and the top of the stairs. I could close the door to the stairs, the door to the bathroom and the door to the kitchen and still have enough light from the glass skylight which was the only roof above me. I moved my desk there, fitting it against two of the three wall-cupboards, which I used as a linen cupboard and spare wardrobe. Oh no, I did not make this arrangement openly. If I had, my kind hosts would immediately have decided upon an alteration for the only space which they had neglected to plan for. There I worked secretly, moving my desk back and forth, and enjoying their triumphant expression each day when they saw how my desk and my papers were surrounded by the instruments of alteration. I say ‘triumphant’. Had I talked to them of my interpretation of their expression they would have been alarmed and horrified, and exclaimed, —We’re doing this all for you, to make you comfortable so you can write.
They’d smile and frown, —Oh Harry, you must think we’re awful, but this is to make you comfortable.
Perhaps I was indulged as a child. I remember that on particularly cold cheerless days my mother would say to me, ‘You don’t want to go to school today, do you, Harry?’ And I’d be tempted not to go, my mother’s painting a picture of such miserable weather inducing me to shiver at the prospect of the wet and the cold and to think favourably of my mother’s kindly qualities. It was only later when I was growing up that I realised it was my mother’s need, her loneliness, which led her to try to keep me home on a wet cold day. She felt that by going to school I was abandoning her. I have observed this attitude towards people who write or paint or compose or in any way desert the living and the visible world to create a world of their own that is a threat to the existence and survival of the generally known world. I have known people to use all kinds of delaying tactics (and the writers, composers and painters and such like themselves use these for are not they as afraid of the threat of the destruction and recreation of the known world?), —Don’t write today. Come and visit us. Let’s talk. Let’s drink. Let’s make love. You don’t really want to work today, do you? Don’t desert us, don’t threaten us, stay here with us, safe in the known world, looking at the sky and the sunlight, relaxing, after all you’re a long time dead.
The old powerful clichés that don’t even speak the truth, for death is the signal for immediate resurrection, since the souls of the living are designed as scavengers.
Therefore, while I condemned the strategy of the Fosters, to possess me, to alter me, to obliterate me, I understood their fears, for I had the same fears myself, but it has been my weakness or my strength or both that I am an observer, a nothingness which or who, suffering intended annihilation, is apt to exclaim, with interested attention, I understand the motive. My policy is disengagement; perhaps I should call it my impulse.
My fellow writers have called me a man of straw. I do not write political articles. I do not march in demonstrations. I do not make my voice heard against tyranny, injustice. In private
life I turn the other cheek as I murmur I understand the motive, therefore I do not even have a claim to be a Christian, in the sense of a follower of Christ, for I make no protest to the boss when I realise that the work he has asked me to do will result in my death and when, at the last minute, I doubt the truth of the promises he made when he himself foretold my death. Being nothing, then, am I to join the ranks of the poverty-stricken bad poets who cry, ‘I am the dawn, the wind, the sky’, an assertion which has not even the properties of logic, since the cry is not also, ‘I am a parking lot, a jet plane, a shark, a vulture’. Am I also seeking my own annihilation, as Dr Rumor believed? And therefore do I gather about myself a favourable climate and the people who will act as the prevailing weather? Then why have I not been destroyed before now?
These were the questions I asked myself as I sat at my desk in the tiny corridor and tried to write my fiction. I began to grow afraid of the new appliances. They were precious; they cost many thousands of francs; their instruction booklets, encased in plastic slip-covers, had the confidence of a well-advertised ‘brilliant first novel’ and the gloss of a record.
‘Faites connaissance avec votre cuisinière jeunes foyers’
Gaz, électrique, mixte,
lamps d’éclairage du four
cas speciaux
Allures de chauffe
puissance électrique
characteristic de brûleurs,
graissage de robinet de dessus
And for the refrigerator,
Prescriptions d’utilisation.
They demanded constant attention. Twice a month the knob de securie of the hot water cylinder had to be manoeuvred to keep the pipes from calcifying (tartarisation); a small palpeur on the electric stove which acted as a thermostat had to be treated as gently as if it were a human heart capable of human heartbeats; and speaking of heartbeats, I felt them in the electric meter when it ticked and tocked the hour – J’ai dit ‘tais-tu’ à son pouls; now and again it was my duty to defrost the refrigerator by pressing the automatic defrost button, unplugging the evaporator, placing a tray beneath it and collecting the ice-water; to clean stove and refrigerator; sweep, scrub, clean; clean leaves from their whirlwind life at the front door; obliterate, cause to vanish the dirt, the dust, the dead leaves; take out the rubbish in small plastic bags to be deposited at the corner of the street by the railway line where the huge feeder-machine swallowed them five times a week; sweep away crumbs, wash the smoke from curtains, take sheets and towels to the laundry, retrieve them in their plastic jackets, still and white; clean the bath, the toilet, with blue disinfectant and fuming bleach-powder, flush, clean, scour, wash down the steps of the patio, remove the dead leaves from the geraniums and support their few pink flower-heads against the earthenware pots ranged around the small stone balcony; geraniums everywhere; clean scour scrub; and bath myself twice a week, my allowance, lying in the deep bath and looking out the window at the tall tops of the waving trees.