In the Memorial Room (2 page)

Two ladies at the presentation (there seemed to be mostly ladies and very very tall men, almost with their heads near the roof, in the small group surrounding me), Connie Watercress and Grace Armstrong, the two principal donors of the Fellowship, replied that Rose Hurndell’s first two books were their favourites, the ones written in New Zealand:
The Harbour
, and
Manuka Night
.

—Her poems have been translated into thirteen languages, Connie said. —And her
Letter to Procne
is now known all over the world. Just think!

I thought – just. There is such intense interest in Rose Hurndell’s works, more so, naturally, now that she is dead, and her last poems have been compared in their purity and otherworldliness, their vision of death, to the Requiem music which Mozart left unfinished, and although they were written before her death they have the effect of being posthumous, of actually being written after death.

The conversation that evening was mostly about Margaret Rose Hurndell and her life and her family. I was told that her sister and her sister’s husband had retired to live in Menton two years ago, and that two friends she had made when she lived in London came each year to spend the winter in Menton and to make a pilgrimage to the Villa Florita. Her work was known in the city. The city was proud that she had lived and died there – yes, they were even proud of her death there, although her body was taken to London to be buried.

Towards the close of that presentation evening, when suddenly the talk of Margaret Rose Hurndell had died away, someone asked me – I think it was Connie Watercress – what I planned to write in Menton. I said vaguely that I did not quite know.

—I’m afraid I haven’t read your last book, Connie said. —But I’ve heard so much about it!
The New Family
.

I smiled and murmured, —Yes,
New Families
.

—There’s a shortage of historical novelists in New Zealand, someone said, as if talking of petrol or transistor batteries or vacuum cleaners.

—So we’re proud to have you.

—Will you be writing something historical, something French?

—Do you speak French?

—Did you know that Peter Cartwright, who’s at Oxford now, thinks you are the finest historical novelist we’ve had? I haven’t read your
Wairau Days
myself but he said it can’t be faulted. I read an article about it in one of the English papers. I get the
Times
and
Guardian
flown over.

—The paper’s too thin, airmail, don’t you find? It tears.

—We’re proud to have you. Perhaps there’ll be more financial support for the Fellowship when they know you’ve got it. We have to advertise you a little, you know.

—He’s blushing.

—So he is!

—Well, Harry, we’ll soon get rid of those blushes.

—Your father’s a doctor, I hear?

And so the conversation continued until one by one the guests found their fur coats and went home, and I stayed a while by myself in the smoke-laden air, snaffling the last few savouries, for I was hungry, and a little drunk, and I went back to the hotel room where they’d booked me (I’d refused to stay with any members of the Committee who’d invited me) and I went straight to bed and fell asleep.

And I dreamed.

I dreamed.

I have definite views about a novelist’s inclusion of dreams in his work. Dreams, I think, are for the first novel where all the material for the future is accumulated, packed tightly as in a storehouse the walls of which are strained to bursting point with their contents. Dreams may be inserted as extra provisions because the storehouse has no further room for solid material; dreams weigh nothing, do not need equipment for their transport and may have a chemical volatility which enables them to be replaced and changed often or annihilated when they are no longer of use. I maintain, however, they are one of the privileged tricks allowable only to the first novel, and, later, when the solid material has been withdrawn and used and the mind itself with the approach of middle and old age and death (not necessarily in that order) begins the process of confirming its doubt of the substantiality of the apparently ‘real’ world, as a preparation for its own final material dissolution, then dreams may re-enter the novelist’s work: he may use them as he will.

This is just my opinion. I have been brought up with the disciplines of research and study with, perhaps, after observing my father at work since I was a child, a tendency to watch for symptoms, to diagnose a work of art, to determine the prognosis, the etiology, the epidemiology, and then to set about ‘curing’ it by writing it.

Therefore, after that preamble, I set down my dreams in what is a journal, not a novel.

That night, after the official presentation of the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship, I dreamed I was back in my flat in Symonds Street, near Grafton Bridge, after visiting my parents at Northcote for dinner. I had just walked in the door when I noticed, sitting on the sofa that was rather worn and covered with a piece of Indian cotton I bought in Queen Street, a woman of about my own age or a few years younger, dressed in the rather short skirt of the late nineteen fifties, with a cashmere sweater, and – pearls, three rows, about her throat. Her hair was fair to gold, quite short and straight and she was slimly built and rather tall, with exceptionally large hands and feet which I thought ugly. She wore no makeup on her face which was rather too broad to be delicate or beautiful as one imagines beauty, but her eyes were the startling blue which is almost violet and so far known by me only inside fiction. She smiled at me. I had a feeling almost of horror when I realised that her perfectly formed white teeth were false – I could just discern the unnaturally pink plastic gums which have since been replaced in dental prosthetics by a more natural colour. The colour of her gums dated, for me, the time of her acquiring her false teeth. She must have been twenty-two or -three then, if, as I guessed, she was now about twenty-nine.

—Well, aren’t you going to say hello? she said.

Her voice was rather deep for her feminine appearance.

—Oh.

I felt myself blushing.

—Harry’s blushing, she said.

—Oh. You must be Margaret Rose Hurndell?

—Rose Hurndell, please. The Margaret Rose is something I can’t bear.

—I was nineteen when you died, I said.

She looked at me curiously.

—Did you know of me when I died?

—I didn’t know your work, I said. —I knew
of
you, that you’d had a son and gone overseas and lived overseas. Someone showed me a book you’d written once. I didn’t read it, I’m afraid. Studies and so on. And I’ve never cared for women poets with three names. I’m curious though. I hope you don’t mind my asking but – when did you get your false teeth?

She laughed, showing more of them than I had seen before. The bright pink gums shone; they were horrible, I thought. A bright colour like carnations that have been painted for a flower show.

—I suppose you think it’s rotten cheek my asking.

She laughed again.

—For God’s sake don’t sound like an English schoolboy. You
are
English, aren’t you?

—I’m a New Zealander now.

—Well, for heaven’s sake never use in my presence those awful dated words, ripping, bounder, jolly – you know. I got my teeth, by the way, on the National Health in London. Do you like them?

—They’re ghastly.

—Don’t use ghastly, either.

—Beastly, then.

—Nor beastly. Not rotten ripping bounder jolly chap. Where’s your New Zealand speech?

—You’re very fussy, I said, —for someone with such horrible teeth.

—They’re even and white, are they not?

—Yes, but the gums, the gums!

—I know.

—The gums of Rose Hurndell.

It was an absurd dream. We simply sat there all evening exchanging absurd remarks. She didn’t seem to me like a poet and I seemed to her like an English schoolboy out of a comic strip of the twenties. And that is all my dream, it simply drifted away. The next morning I took down from my bookshelf a copy of her
Fifty Living Men
which I bought (the only one of her books I could find) when I knew of my scholarship award.

I read:

The Ministerial prime

a political summertime

berg, baron, bedtime

elective ice, infertile wives,

an unfurnished room of nose-gays and lilies of the valley.

Not one of her good poems, I thought. All general, no particular. I read on:

The general has slain

has overcome the particular domain

a man is men one is fifty fifty is one

only there is no sun to be under

time out of particular thunder

the mind emerges kept honeyful and warm

by a swarm.

I don’t care for such poems. It occurred to me that in another few years they’d be forgotten, that although Rose Hurndell had become well known and much read, one had only to look in the endpapers of old books to find the extravagant praises of forgotten authors. I fancied that seven or eight years is too brief a time after death for the kind of memorial which the Watercresses and the Armstrongs had founded, for their memorial gesture might find itself also engulfed in the gradual oblivion necessary before the re-emergence of those whose qualities of work survive decay. I suspected therefore that the founding of the scholarship was a means by which the Watercresses and the Armstrongs, denied fame in their journalistic endeavours, might snatch a little of its nourishing glory (as I had snatched the savouries after the ceremony, for I had been hungry, and all the rich invited guests had gone), sheltered and strengthened by the growth, blossoming and presence of Rose Hurndell as the small plants in the bush are sheltered and given life by the starry-blooming manuka. The title of Rose Hurndell’s second book,
Manuka Night
, seemed appropriate in that setting.

I know, as I have said, that my own motives for applying for and accepting the scholarship are far from ‘pure’. I am aware of the drama of ‘the young man going blind’. When one is faced with such disasters in one’s life one has to use the drama of the situation as a vehicle to go through it or bypass it. The name Menton has no particular appeal to me. I am curious of course about Rose Hurndell and her life and work. I shall be interested to meet her brother-in-law Dorset Foster and her sister Elizabeth who have travelled to set up their retirement home so far from their own country and who must have been lured by the fact that Elizabeth’s sister lived and died there. No doubt I shall meet also the Louise Markham who left her husband Haniel and went to Menton to the Villa Florita to live with Rose Hurndell until her death. I have been told that both Haniel and Louise Markham have a permanent winter apartment in Menton. And the Watercresses who know Menton have told me, ‘to put me in the picture’ as they expressed it, of Liz and George Lee, the English couple who help to run the English library, of their own son Michael who, they say, is a promising writer. They have hinted that perhaps, who knows, when I arrive in Menton they will be waiting to welcome me and ‘show me the ropes’, a nautical term no doubt appropriate to use to one who sails in a few weeks to spend thirty-two days on board a ship of the Paradise Line.