In the Memorial Room (4 page)

During my first three days at the Villa Paradiso I found a small one-room apartment which I could pay for with the rather meagre Fellowship and owing to the understanding of the patron of the Villa Paradiso I was allowed to leave after three days. So. There I was, three days in Menton, with a tiny sordid apartment to stay in, not far from the famous Margaret Rose Hurndell Memorial Room, which I had not yet seen, the key being held by one of the French officials of the town, and recovered enough from my journeys of the past five weeks to be ready for the official welcoming reception and dinner. These were held on my fifth day, in an order of creation, so to speak, and the reception, I’m told, though my memory was blurred by sea-travel and champagne, went very well, being held along with a reception for a retiring commander of the Navy, a native of Menton, so that most of the evening was devoted to naval speeches and conversations (with most of the guests sailors – in a way continuing the Paradise journey) while the speech to welcome me was delivered during one of the lulls which periodically occur in a cocktail party. Suddenly, I found the mayor advancing towards me, my name spoken aloud, photographers appearing and surrounding me, and Connie and Max and Michael Watercress and his wife Grace, and there was the gracious mayor extending his hand to – Michael Watercress. Of course. The stereotype author. I blushed miserably like a schoolboy. Apologetically the mayor turned to me and shook hands but the photographers had already taken their photos. An account of the ceremony appeared in
Nice-Matin
three days later, with a photograph captioned,
The Mayor shakes hands with this year’s Watercress-Armstrong Fellow
. The photograph showed the gracious mayor extending his hand to Michael Watercress.

Standing near Michael Watercress, the perfectly presentable stereotype of the modern author, you could see if you looked closely, though half the body was out of the photo, a rather stocky young man with glasses and curly hair and a look of what might be frenzied embarrassment on his face. He was holding his hand in a mimicry of the bearded young writer’s pose.

I must tell you that I was equally successful, or unsuccessful, at the dinner that evening, given at the famous seaside restaurant, where Michael Watercress – and why not? – mistaken for the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow, was given three free bottles of champagne to take home. His protest was feeble; his delight was evident. I thought as I looked at him,
We’re the same age
. Which is substance, which is shadow, and where, who, is the sun? I decided I would get to know him, his wife, and the Watercress family.

My apartment was a small room accommodating a double bed, an oil-cloth covered small table, an armchair and two wooden chairs and a large wardrobe with a drawer and a door-mirror. A sheet of softboard divided this room from the cooking
coin
which consisted of two cupboards, a small gas stove such as is used in caravans and camping, a sink with cold water. Just inside the door of the room, through a wooden door, was the lavatory with rusted cistern and broken downpipe sealed with Sellotape and string, a small washbasin with two taps, one labelled COLD, out of which cold water flowed, the other HOT out of which nothing flowed. Beneath the basin, set on a frame, was a small bidet. The room was one of four ‘companion’ rooms, each opening on to a long balcony and screened from one another by pot plants, ferns and geraniums. The balcony overlooked the huge tiled roof of a garage from which it received, through ventilation holes in the tiled roof, waves of fumes of petrol and oil and these, combining with the trapped fumes from the slightly leaking gas stoves within the rooms, left a permanent sickening vapour upon the pretty geraniumed balconies.

To the right were the mountains, bare rock, white light, lemon trees, grey olives, even the young trees born with their ancientness, their snow-stone colour, and the thin drooping leaves like willow leaves in shape, all the olive trees with their colour stirring in the heart like an ancient grey mist; that was the mountain on the right; and the decayed villas with rust running out of their blank-eyed windows and fragments of twisted iron here and there in the grounds beneath the orange and the lemon trees and the palm trees as if some huge public work, once conceived, had been given up as hopeless; and the dogs, the hunting dogs which could devour a man, straining to get your flesh through the rusted iron gates.

The sound of the sea, on the left, was buried by the roar of the trucks labouring up and through the narrow alleyway to Italy, their fumes rising and mingling with the salt spray when the tide was high.

My small room was squalid. On the second day the lavatory stank. My landlord muttering, ‘
C’est mal
,
c’est mal
,’ twisted a piece of wire inside the cistern, stopping the leak but not the stink. It was in these conditions that Dorset and Elizabeth Foster, the brother-in-law and sister of Margaret Rose Hurndell, found me in my second week in Menton.

—We knew we’d find you, they cried together, with triumph.

—You are the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow. And we are related to Margaret Rose Hurndell – her sister and brother-in-law.

I wondered why they used the present tense.

They waited, as if for me to acknowledge their relationship, and I had a strong feeling that I ought to make a consolatory remark, as if Margaret Rose had just died and they were mourning.

—They say she was a great writer, I said.

—We’ve heard of
your
work, too. Dorset was reading something about it only last week.

I smiled my usual stupid smile.

—We’ve come to retire here from New Zealand. Dorset’s French is perfect. We wondered –

They looked at each other, sharing a secret.

—We’ve bought a large house and a smaller one just beside it. We thought if you’d like to look at the small one, and live in it while you’re here, you’d be most welcome. It’s the least we can do for Margaret Rose.

They looked around my small squalid room.

—These are not really the conditions for a promising young writer like you to be living in.

I agreed. I’m an habitual agreer.

—No, they’re not really.

—We’ll call for you on Saturday then? To show you the house?

—Fine.

—Saturday then.

—Saturday.

We shook hands in the French custom and bid one another voluble,
au revoir
,
à bientôt
,
à samedi
.

The Dorset Fosters had been gone only half an hour when further callers announced themselves, forming single file on the tiny terrace.

—We thought we’d find you home, they said.

—We’ve brought you the key to the Memorial Room.

The Ceremony of the Key, I thought. Wasn’t such a ceremony carried out in the Tower of London, in connection with the Crown Jewels?

Appropriately, it was Michael Watercress who stepped almost in a military fashion out of the line to hand me a Yale key with a tag inscribed, simply, Rose Hurndell. The yellow-tagged key to Rose Hurndell.

Remembering my duties as a host I offered them all a glass of
vin léger pour le table
but Connie refused for all. The handing over of the key was an emotional moment for her. She herself was a writer and with her husband Max had written books and articles for the newspapers, but somehow their writing life had been separated from their ambition, and lost, like the tail cut from the lizard. The death and the fame of Rose Hurndell, the former rendering her harmless, the latter providing unscreened warmth, had enabled them once again to unite to the body of their ambition, and to bask, their pulses ticking with excitement, in the reflected glory. They flourished in her fame. They flourished in their generous attempt to ensure her fame. The sun must not go out. There must be no more winter.

—No. We won’t stay to drink with you, Connie said. —Some official has asked us to dinner. Do you know, I think he thinks that
Michael
is the new Fellow.

—He does, Mum. He does.

Michael smiled his delight. Connie and Max and Grace were also delighted, but Max, to bring a little reality into the conversation, said, —I wouldn’t be surprised if Michael
were
the Fellow one day. He’s a talented young writer.

—When we were in the East, Grace said, (they had been in the East, and many of their sentences began with ‘When we were in the East’) —people were talking of him as the young Hemingway.

My confidence so easily flounders. For a moment I was convinced that Michael Watercress and not I was the new Fellow, that I was an imposter, that I’d been given the Fellowship under false pretences. After all, my eyesight was failing. By some terrible
over
sight I may have misread everything in connection with the Fellowship, even my acceptance, and my journey; I may have come
blindly
to Menton.

My mood was momentary. It passed. Still, to be called the young Hemingway was a compliment. I looked at Michael Watercress with a writer’s envy; certainly I would never be called the young Hemingway. I didn’t even look like the young Hemingway. People might mistake me for a waiter or a school teacher or a floorwalker or a farmer; they would always know immediately that Michael Watercress was a
writer
.

—So we’re rushing to go out to dinner. Find time, won’t you, to sneak along to the Memorial Room, and just feel the atmosphere? Rose Hurndell didn’t exactly work there but I thought you’d like to go
on your own
. Just
feel it all
.

The next day I took the advice of Connie Watercress and paid my first visit to the Rose Hurndell Memorial Room. I walked up a narrow street, beneath a railway bridge, and up another narrow street that had once been a Roman road, and on the left I saw the notice, Margaret Rose Hurndell Memorial Room. A copper plaque against the wall gave the date of birth and death of Rose Hurndell and the works –
Letter to Procne
,
The Lemon Festival
,
Requirements
,
Rehearsals
– which she had written while staying at the Villa Florita which I now saw was separated from the small room by a wall and a locked gate.

At no time, I knew, had Rose Hurndell inhabited the small room – a former larder or
lapinière
– set aside as a memorial for her.

The garden was overgrown with weeds, the stairs leading to the small garden thick with sodden leaves and fragments of papers thrown off the street. Putting the ‘Rose Hurndell key’ in the lock I pushed the weather-beaten sun-blistered wooden door which permitted itself to open halfway: it had ‘dropped’ like an old womb. I walked in. I opened the tiny windows. The room slowly became ‘aired’ like old stored linen. Small chut-chutting birds, with whistlings and secretive noises, began singing outside. A cool wind blew through the windows and out the door, a between-winter-and-spring wind. There was an air of desolation in the room and beyond it. The water-spotted plaques, giving once again details of Rose Hurndell’s career, were scarcely legible. There was a desk, a bookshelf, a few straight-backed vicarage-type chairs and a layer of cold along the bare tiled floor.

I could hear the long grass swaying in the neglected garden, and the brittle rustling of the flax bushes that some former visitor had planted near the crumbling wall.

Here, I thought, if one were a spirit or dead, is a sanctuary. With a sudden rush of wind, dead leaves, twigs and a scrap of paper blew in the door. The air of desolation, of neglect, increased; the chill, of the wind and of the spirit, intensified and I knew the peace that is most known when walking in a cemetery, one is contained within it, withdrawn as the dead are from the world, and listening as if from a great distance to the movements and noises of the city and its people. It would have been more fitting, I thought, had Rose Hurndell been buried here and not in London. Here, in this room, they had another grave for her, to keep alive her death rather than her work. A unique memorial, to pay a writer to work within a tomb! I felt, however, that if the sheer physical discomfort (there was no access to running water or toilet, little light, and little warmth – what need have the dead of these? – and in the course of my day’s work I would spend several hours in this one place) could be ignored (though unhappily it could not) I should find in the grave-like aspect of this room, in spite of the roar of the construction machinery in the many apartments being built nearby and the constant close passing of the trains, all of which became somehow insulated when one thought of oneself in a grave where one could not be reached, a sanctuary for working. (I found, unfortunately, later, when spring and summer came with warmth and light, that visitors also came: everyone who passed, seeing the door open, came curiously in to inspect the open tomb.)

I stayed a while sitting at the desk. I was overcome by a feeling of sadness that is conducive to some kind of writing but not to the kind of writing I was preparing.

I went out to explore the small garden where I found a green garden seat which I cleared, brushing away the small wine-coloured squashy berries, and I lay down, half in sun, half in shadow, looking up at the lemon tree in the neighbouring garden. I closed my eyes. The sun came out again, moving quickly, and was on my face, burning. I changed my position on the seat. The sun was hidden once again behind cloud, the chill started again, rustling the flax with a brittle snapping sound, and the secretive small birds once again set up their chittering and tutting. I fell asleep. I dreamed. The wine-coloured squashy berries which I had cleared from the seat and which came from a tree spreading above the seat, began to rain on me like ruby-stones, ruby-fruit, and filled my eyes with red juices and in my dream I remembered my arrival at Menton and the blessing of the colour green which I now found that I could not visualise, being able to remember only the shape encompassing the green which was now being distorted by the overflowing of the red. It was as if I were seeing the after-image of a blessing: not necessarily a curse, but rather the source of the green blessing. I found my confusion increasing. I told myself that I was dreaming the literary dream of a literary blind man, just as those who write or dream fiction have invented a ‘literary’ madness which abstracts from the dreary commonplaces of thinking and behaviour a poetic essence and sprinkles it where the shadow of ‘the truth’ falls upon the written or printed page. When in my dream I thought, perhaps this is the way Rose Hurndell died – had she not died of a brain haemorrhage, a sudden overflowing of life-blood into the brain which keeps its distance from blood.