In the Memorial Room (10 page)

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—There’s always a chance, Connie had said, —we may find an unpublished manuscript.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

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 equivalent 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.

—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.

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.