In the Memorial Room (5 page)

Half-waking I heard the barking of a hundred guard dogs in the villas on the mountain-side, as if a pack of
chiens de chase
had broken loose, as I’d read that morning in the newspaper they had done, and set upon their master, an old man in a mountain village, and devoured him, and I heard them coming nearer and still I could see nothing but the second layer, if you will, of blessing of green life, which was fire, and I struggled, and the slats on the green garden seat felt like stakes pressed against my back; then suddenly, I think with the dropping of the real wind, the barking of the dogs ceased, my eyes cleared, and in my dream I found myself looking at a painting, a French comte and two hunting dogs – how still they seemed – captured and framed in the painting; they were the huge black dogs that walking beside a man have their heads on a level above his thighs and inspire fear and certain feelings of excitement associated with killing and loving; they walk like allies, equals. I am afraid of violence, in myself and in others. A sweat of relief broke out on my face when I saw the dogs were held within the painting; the stillness was not to be believed.

I woke. The desolate sighing of the wind had ceased. The sun had gone down. I thought I must have been asleep for hours. All the colours of the world had grown a shade more sombre and a penetrating chill had fallen from the mountain peaks.

Hastily I shut the windows and the doors of the Rose Hurndell Memorial Room and hurried back to my apartment. In the gas-smelling cooking
coin
I made myself a cup of coffee.

The next day when I saw Connie and Max Watercress for lunch at a café down by the beach Connie asked, —Have you seen it?

I thought for a moment she was talking of the new comet which everyone had been hoping to glimpse as it was supposed to droop its tail over the Côte d’Azur at six the previous evening.

—No, I couldn’t see it, I said. —I think it’s a hoax.

A defensive, determined light, which I was to grow used to, came into Connie’s eyes.

—I don’t think that’s the way to talk of the Memorial Room.

I was apologetic.

—No, no, I was thinking of the comet. Yes, I’ve seen the room.

—Did you
feel
Rose Hurndell there?

A lustful thought came to me and I couldn’t help smiling. Then I cleared my throat.

—Oh yes. The place reminds me of a grave.

Again the defensive light appeared in Connie’s eyes.

—It’s been neglected of course but they’ve promised alterations for this year. Water, toilet, electricity, and so on.

—I shan’t be able to work there, I said. —I work long hours and it’s not suited to long hours, without facilities.

—Still, when the improvements are made, Max said.

—Yes, when the improvements are made, Connie said.

—Yes, of course.

—It’s important that you be there, feel the presence. You do like her work?

—Yes, yes, I do.

—I’m so glad. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that she actually lived and worked here, that she went to the Monaco Oceanographic Museum one day, she mentions it in a letter, I believe her sister is preparing her letters – oh and you must meet Haniel and Louise Markham, they’ll tell you so much about her. Her favourite colour was red. That shows life, doesn’t it? From the very first moment I read her books I knew: here is a genius. My brother knew her mother, you know.

—Did he?

—We come here every year, on the anniversary of her death, in October, to put a wreath of red flowers and leaves in the Memorial Room. There’s a small ceremony. Later, when improvements are made, we’ll have a glass case in the room, with two of her notebooks (one has no writing in it but it’s the kind she always bought, from Woolworths) and a handkerchief, some early photos, a copy of a certificate won at primary school for the best long jump – Long Jump Champion, just imagine! I think it was twenty-two feet long…

—Twenty-one, dear, Max corrected.

—I don’t remember exactly. But it tells something about her, don’t you think?

I agreed.

—There’s to be a reading of her works here, in October.

—I shall miss it, I said regretfully.

—We’ll be here. And Michael and Grace are coming. Michael is going to cover it for his newspaper in England. He’s doing so well with his writing. He’s not written a book yet, but the discipline will come to him, in time. Every morning all four of us straight after breakfast sit down to do our stint. Don’t we?

They had apartments side by side in a gracious old building.

—Yes. Grace has written ten poems too, you know, and published two books. When they get settled there’ll be no stopping them.

—I suppose not, I said.

The next morning I called in to see the Watercresses on my way to the bank (there’d been some problem with the arrival of my scholarship money) and I found the working in action. I hesitated to interrupt. Connie and Max had rented for a month a large apartment with all facilities including hot water and a bath, a bedroom and a living room and kitchen. Grace and Michael, next door, had one large room and all facilities. This morning all were seated around the large oval table in the big sitting-room. Each had a large white sheet of paper, and in the centre of the table were two boxes of coloured crayons. All four were busily drawing.

I observed them. Max, in his late seventies, was of rather stout build, with rosy face and military moustache. When he walked his bearing was military, and his accent was English. I’d been told (to my anticipatory horror) that he’d had an operation on his eyes and wore glasses that were a kind of magnifying lens, so that when one looked at his eyes one saw huge brown dog-like orbs that in their magnification revealed the slightest wave of emotion. I had a sense of unreality thinking of him with his repaired eyes and I with my failing sight and sometimes getting myself into the frame of mind where he and I were brothers, or father and son, that anyway we shared an unusual condition and therefore should have special insight into each other. I saw in him only his love for and pride in his son. When he looked at Michael, if you observed closely, you could see the magnified brown eyes quivering with love; they would grow moist with their love and pride.

As far as Max was concerned Michael was the genius, the writer – well, the talented young man who could be (it was not yet the time in his life when one said ‘could have been’) a writer, or a painter (‘he’s always been good at drawing and painting’) or a composer and musician (‘he has perfect pitch, he nearly took a music degree, he has composed hundreds of songs and pieces of music’). Michael’s talents were indeed impressive and every time I was with his parents I was made conscious of them.

I watched Connie, bent over her sheet of paper, drawing with a large blue crayon, absorbed in her work. Her face was permanently pale with the kind of makeup which suppresses colour in the cheeks. Her cheekbones were high and rather narrowed her small blue eyes. She too was stockily built and dressed usually in a tweed costume such as New Zealand women wear to the horse races at Addington and Avondale, and her evening wear to the receptions and dinners for the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow was usually a dress of dark shimmering material, and she carried a small spangled evening bag. Her hands, grasping the crayon, were plump and floury. When she spoke, French or English, she spoke slowly, almost mechanically, with a swaying motion of her body as if she had within her some instrument for winding her words, in sentence-containers, up from a great depth where they had fallen or been banished; sometimes one felt as if they were extracted with difficulty, as if she herself had gone away down into the rock to hack them out and shake them clean – a long slow process which made her listeners impatient: usually Max or Michael took over the telling of a long story when the words to fit it appeared to be growing scarce.

Grace, as one who had stolen the beloved son, knew her privileges; retelling Connie’s stories was not one of them. Grace, in this family setting, was the tolerated outsider whose slightest false move would change her to the enemy; the seeds of enmity had been planted with her arrival as Michael’s unofficial wife but the rain- and sun-making forces necessary for their growth had been imprisoned within the seasonless weatherless world of the parents’ love for or indulgence of their son. While they occupied themselves with their ambitions for life through the death of Margaret Rose Hurndell, they were preparing for the life of their son (and thus, ultimately their own lives) to obscure and obliterate both the life and death of Margaret Rose Hurndell. They offered Grace no share of these ambitions, particularly as she was evidently disinclined to bring forth a little half-Michael who could be used if the whole-Michael plans came to nothing. In the midst of these politics of permanence I felt as unsafe and foreign and brief as a mayfly out of season; or like someone who growing up in the world and acquiring all the skills necessary for survival, particularly the skill of finding some relation to the passing of time, with the kindly aid of darkness and light and the rhythm of the body and the use of clocks, suddenly finds his biological clock is broken and he is unable to read the meaning of a clock- or watch-face, and, worst of all, it is dark because his eyes are blind.

As I said, I did not interrupt the morning work of the Watercresses. I left quietly, taking with me a feeling of being menaced – I think it was when Max said
au revoir
and his huge eyes like the saucer-eyes of the guard dogs in the old tales seemed to detach themselves from his face and swim into the air, suspended there like huge tadpole-beginnings, frog-seeds. I said to myself I would need to keep a control over my so-called historical imagination!

For most of the first two weeks of my stay, beginning with the New Year, the weather was fine and gentle, the air clear blue and fresh, the mountains compositions of white light stark against the sky. People crowded the promenades each afternoon; the marinas were packed with visiting luxury yachts and smaller family boats from Belgium, Norway, Denmark; windows were opened; radios played louder; the huge construction works on the many
immeubles
caused the surrounding buildings to shudder with constant deafening activity of their machinery and the air to be filled with flakes of white dust as if from a construction-generated snowstorm.

Then suddenly one morning the Côte d’Azur woke to find itself forced to accept a share of the bitter winter weather, the wild storms that raged over the country, in hurricanes, avalanches, floods. The chill wind wailed and whistled, the breakers crashed over the promenades, the new apartment buildings, set with disastrous folly in stark-naked earth from which the trees hundreds of years old had been
déraciné
, began their slow inevitable movement downhill, with great cracks appearing in their walls and foundations and their topmost storeys leaning at a dangerous angle.

On these days of bitter cold and down-driving rain I went once or twice to the Memorial Room and sat huddled in the dank grave-like cold watching the wall of water tumbling from the terrace of the Villa Florita over the doorway of the Room like a cascade of unceasing tears. Then I’d return to my tiny squalid apartment and crouch by the radiator in the corner. At night I’d put all my clothes on the big double bed and creep under the thin blankets provided with the apartment, resting my head on the long sausage bolster, and listening to my transistor radio, its small white earpiece thrust in my ear. I cursed that I was a bachelor. What a dreary life an author’s life is, I thought. Then I’d sniff the current of gas that came my way from the toilet
coin
and then I’d switch off the radio and close my eyes, and then I’d remember my eyes, and wonder about them. Then I’d pray fiercely as people do as a last resort when they find themselves on a sinking boat or a crashing plane: God, please let me learn to know the darkness.

One morning, after such a night, instead of waking into the usual absence of pain, and ashamed of my prayer, I felt a burning pressure above my eyes as if my eyeballs were being forced back into my head, and the light, at first, pierced like splinters through my eyes. Gradually the objects in the room became clearer, but the pain persisting above and in my eyes; I made up my mind to consult the doctor whose address I had noted in case of emergency. Doctor Alberto Rumor, 10 Rue Henry Bennet, Menton. This was on the day when Dorset and Elizabeth Foster had arranged to take me to view their small villa with the prospect of my liking it well enough to rent it.

The day was stormy; the waves crashed over the promenade. I could hear the sound of the waves as I sat, my hands pressed over my eyes, to relieve the pain, waiting while Doctor Rumor, who had made a thorough examination of my eyes, reported his opinion which he hoped would be confirmed by the X-rays and blood tests he was arranging for me. He spoke English to such perfection that I became convinced that my own English was ‘broken’ and foreign. He was elderly, with rimless glasses, and a dust-coloured suit, with the coat flecked grey. His chin was full, above a mouth that one imagined was forever moving – either in speech gesture or in eating. Every now and again he made small noises of satisfaction, tasting noises, with his lips, like a chef getting the precise flavour of his cuisine. He wore a huge watch, like a navigating instrument, which he glanced at every now and again as if to orient himself on earth.