In the Memorial Room (3 page)

My preliminary journal ends here. During my stay in Menton I shall make notes in between writing a novel, and when I return from Menton with (I hope) my novel completed, I shall write the story of my tenure of the Fellowship. Tenure is a word which appeals to me.

The Tenure

As one known purely as an historical novelist (the ‘known’ being an exaggeration as I believe a writer is not ‘known’ until his grocer and barber have read his works without astonishment) about to yield to the temptations of English fiction or, in the case of recording my experiences of the
tenure
of the Fellowship, English fact, I have an enticing range of possibilities beginning with
Beowulf
,
The Wanderer
and
The Seafarer
and continuing, as you are aware, through
Euphues
, Thomas More, Milton, and so on to Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming. Do you sense a slight lowering of standards towards the end? Is it the end?

How shall my story be expressed? How shall I bring myself alive to your ears and eyes, all your senses? I have already described my face; you will have found nothing particular in it; you may have concluded that I am a mere particular in it; you may have concluded that I am a mere generality. The names of my two books, however, are definite, existing beyond me; you will certainly not have read them but you will have ‘heard of’ them or ‘read of’ them which is about all a young writer like myself can hope for and not be downcast by, unless, even when he is no longer young, the pseudo-reading of his work continues.

I have told you my age, and, vaguely, the course of my studies. I have mentioned my family, my origins. Unless you are to imagine that I am homosexual and unless I wish to encourage you in this belief because it is true, I must account for my personal relations between puberty and the present, and you may even wish me to explain to you why I have not yet married, for marriage today is an affair between schoolboys and schoolgirls and I, who have lingered, find myself questioned in a conforming society.

I haven’t yet found anyone to love. There are people like me, you know, who are not given a large dose of libido and who conserve what they have for their own purpose of staying alive. The prospect of my blindness has, I’ll admit, the effect of driving me at times into a state of panic and in such a state I may be likely to fall in love very quickly, at first sight, as one swallows a strong drink. I don’t know. I would describe this present age as an age of Explanation when the overriding fear is that nothing should remain unexplained, and this, combined with the age of excess of literacy brings every man and woman to a state of watchfulness (Why did I do this? Why did I do that? Let me explain…) that is exceeded only by the watchfulness of nations and their elected or self-appointed guardians. The world has adopted the Boy Scout motto, ‘Be Prepared’, while remaining at the Boy Scout level of maturity.

My story, however, is of my
tenure
of the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship. Like any young man setting out on a voyage I was filled with excitement and anticipation and (because of the problem with my eyesight which I did not speak of) there was at times an alarming fear that I was about to be struck ‘the mortal blow’. Had I been ten or twenty years older I would not have dreamed of making this voyage, chiefly because by the time one reaches the forties and fifties the insulation against even the prospect of danger and disaster is wearing thin and the physical menaces of a walk from home to supermarket are now visible in detail and demand careful strategy, as if the likely victim were travelling thousands of miles to the other side of the world. I shan’t describe my voyage on that famous ship of the Paradise Line that was overpopulated with anxiety-ridden immigrants returning with their families from the Pacific lands to their former dreamed-of homes in Holland, France, Germany, Great Britain with the intensity of the dream increasing the level of anxiety and the supposed ‘permanence’ of the move in a life where few things are permanent weighing so heavily on their minds and bodies that each morning the waiting room of the young bulbous-nosed arrogant doctor, who was scarcely more than a medical student, was filled to overflowing with sniffling, crying, groaning passenger-patients, while from the deckchairs ranged along the promenade deck came, from the would-be lotus eaters trapped thirty-two days in the ship of the Paradise Line:

a doleful song

Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong.

The analogy with the lotus eaters was completed by the continuous playing of deck music,

There is sweet music here that softer falls.

No, I shan’t describe that voyage, or my time spent day after day leaning over the deck-rail trying to get a voice or signal from the small transistor radio I bought, greedily, at duty-free prices; or lying in the tiny cream-painted cabin, trying to read in the dimmest light although all the cabin lights were switched on, almost driving myself to destroy my sight with word-trash instead of word-treasure, weighing the moral acceptability of each form of destruction, and finding in the mutinous lunacy that seizes all passengers during that eleven-day journey, without land, across the Pacific, when one does not need to have killed an albatross to suffer the nightmare, that destruction by trash is more to be approved; and so I’ll not describe my voyage which was filled with counterfeit words and phrases, eyes that followed around rooms, that dropped, glistened, drooped, glances that travelled and were exchanged and burned, hot looks that set the heart on fire, smouldering looks, hearts in ashes, ice-cold hearts and melting hearts. I wrote nothing. I read trash. I read one writer, however, who paid with his thought, paid exactly, for the use of his language. And yet of that I remember only the various uses that human beings may be put to – there was a man, the writer said, who lived in Edinburgh at the turn of last century and who rented his humped back in the streets as a desk for clerks to write their accounts upon.

My story, however, is of the
Tenure
. I disembarked from my ship of the Paradise Line (you will note my possessive pronoun after thirty-two days of sailing
within her
), and I travelled by train, not by
Le Train Bleu
, for I must tell you, as it is important in my story, that I am the kind of person who is inclined to miss the best trains, to find the worst rooms in hotels, the surliest waiters in restaurants; nor am I the kind of person to protest, for the life-long disability with my eyesight has accustomed me to the belief that others see the ‘real’ world but I do not – how can I when my eyesight is defective; I have to take the words of others and of the world on trust and be labelled variously with the same implication, a fool, a doormat, someone who is forever being imposed upon. I am the classic ‘shy mild little man’ who may resort to physical violence if he is desperate, or, if he is literary, to linguistic violence – well, there are many ways of facing the aggressor, if one can identify the aggressor. Someone once told me, however, that I am the uttermost fool, away at the end of the line, because I sometimes do not recognise that I am being imposed upon.

I travelled next to a seat I had reserved but it was already taken, therefore I did not argue. I sat up all night in an airless carriage, and I tried from time to time to perceive France, for this was my first visit anywhere ‘overseas’, but I saw reflected in the window only my own dust-distorted face and those of my five companions. I took out my French phrase book which I’d bought the week before my ship sailed (I studied French intermittently at school) and read most of the night, listening also to the conversation of my fellow passengers. From time to time I had a sensation of the greyness of the world which I supposed to be related to my eye condition, as if the rods or cones of my sight were being destroyed and I were to be left with the vision which they say cats have, of eternal greyness. Just before the train drew into Menton, in the early morning, I had been dozing, and I remember I wakened, and the green of the palms, the palms themselves, which made me think momentarily that I had travelled to the heart of a desert, they were so unlike trees I had seen anywhere before, seemed in their greenness to bathe my eyes with blessing – all the foliage of all the trees seemed to shine, as dew or rain had fallen.

I had wondered, before, whether in the process of losing my sight I would begin greedily to observe colour – or would it be shape and form – or the placing of the world, the composition of a room, a street, a view of mountains and the sea – would I begin to hoard the world, I wondered, as people hoard their possessions for the simple reason that they are dying and can take nothing with them? I did not even know the answer at the moment the train drew into Menton city. I felt, just then, a kind of indebtedness to green, as a colour. Do we possess most what we are indebted to? Could I have said, as a painter, or poet:

Les Anges, sont-ils devenus discrets!

Le mien à peine m’interroge.

Que je lui rende au moins le reflet

d’un email de Limoges.

Et que mes rouges, mes verts, mes bleus,

son oeil rond réjouissent.

S’il les trouve terrestres, tant mieux

pour un ciel en prémisses.

In that case one becomes what one is indebted to.

But my story is of the Tenure…

If you had expected me to tell you that Margaret Rose Hurndell, thirteen years dead, was on the station platform to meet me, you may be as disappointed as I would have been startled had it been so. I was, however, startled to find Connie and Max Watercress, whom I had last seen at the reception in Wellington, and a handsome richly bearded young man, the perfect stereotype of ‘the young writer’, whom they introduced as their son Michael, and his wife Grace, a tall large-boned fair-haired American with a sallow scar-pitted face and prominent teeth.

Naturally, they hurried to explain their presence. I realised that I was not mistaken in assessing the assessment of me by others – there had been some idea that I might not be able to cope (with my eyesight) with arrival in a foreign land, and so Connie and Max from New Zealand had arranged with Michael and Grace from England to be in Menton and welcome me
in force
, as it were.

—So here we are, Connie said, in rather self-conscious French.

—Welcome to Menton.

The four, chorusing the welcome, were joined by two other voices, one belonging to a smartly dressed eager-eyed and -faced woman in her fifties who gave her name as Liz Lee, Head of the Welcoming Committee, the other of her husband, George Lee, an Englishman in his middle sixties with an astonishingly unintelligible English voice which made him appear to be saying, through scarcely moving lips, then and whenever I spoke to him afterwards, one sentence only,
Angela will be livid
, from which one had to extract meaning and devise an intelligible appropriate answer, so that my conversation with him always went thus:

He: Angela will be livid.
I: Yes, I was there last week.

Or thus:

He: Angela will be livid. Angela will be livid.
Angela will be livid.
I: I found it quite pleasant in its way, considering.

From time to time I had a dreadful thought that he might have suffered a stroke which made it difficult for him to move his lips in speech. My search to excuse will lead me always to the infirmities of mind and body; still, I’m not so much a saint that I did not enjoy the absurdity of our conversation and perhaps sense a hint of the power it gave him, of one who ‘spoke with tongues’, concealed amid the dreadful exposures of clear enunciation which were enacted around him.

After the welcoming ceremony at the station and the remarks that I must be tired, the six claimed my two suitcases for me, and saw me to a taxi, directing it to the Villa Paradiso where I had booked, by letter from New Zealand, for five days, choosing the Villa Paradiso out of the four suggested to me by Connie Watercress (Villas Maria, Rosa, Louise, Paradiso) with the wild extravagance of adventure which suggested that as I was travelling by a ship of the Paradise Line it might be just as well for me, on my arrival at Menton, to extend my stay in Paradise.