In the Memorial Room (9 page)

The road was narrow, with scarcely enough room for oncoming traffic to pass, and the ravines were steep with the road falling immediately from its edge into a tangle of wild woods, mimosa trees, olive trees, and, along the rising slopes, the grey cloud of the many lavender bushes, seen as a cloud in spite of the fact that I wore my glasses.

Without my glasses all shapes were blurred. This duality of seeing posed a problem for me if I were to carry out my plan of describing only what was external and visible, the common property of human sight. For instance, when I looked from my window in the early morning when I had just got up I could see clearly on the roof of a villa about a hundred metres away two human figures pointing and gesticulating and sometimes leaning close, and in the imperceptible change from seeing to supposing I might have reported that I saw two people, up early, as I was, to enjoy the morning and look out over the sea from the best vantage point – the roof of their apartment. When I put on my glasses, however, I could see clearly that I had been looking at two tall narrow chimneys standing side by side. And if my sight worsened, as I feared it would, how could I be sure that the two people which had become two chimneys would not become, with each deterioration of sight, completely different yet faithfully observed objects? Or if I found myself an optician who provided me with glasses of increasing power, even beyond the power of binoculars, even microscopic power, and I described what I saw ‘with my own eyes’, what then would the two chimneys become – a moving mass of molecules, a city with a population of stony particles, furiously in motion? And if I looked out of my window then and wrote:

From my window I see a city of stone, with a population of stone particles, a restless city forever in motion, a perpendicular city which fills the sky and is on fire at its centre, a controlled fire which emerges from the heights in hyphen-shaped smoke ribboned in the colours of the spectrum. There is no light as we know it in the city. It is a rainbow city, a city of the analysis of light.

If I were to describe those two people and two chimneys thus, would you say I was being ‘truthful’?

I thought of this problem as I travelled in the bus to Sainte-Agnès. My three thousand words without adjectives, without judgment, feeling, thinking, had almost been destroyed by Louise Markham’s time-image from within the convention of the myth.

—
Your time is your own
.

I was shocked, too, by the revelation, only that morning, that the couple who regularly admired the early view from the rooftop over the sea were nothing but two chimneys standing side by side.

As the bus neared the side road halfway up the mountains where George and Liz Lee had instructed me to stop, I
made up my mind
, for my visit to them, to effect a mental change in the magnification of my vision – I’m not sure by how many centimetres, as if my eyes being binoculars I revolved their lenses to a point where, had I been again looking at the chimneys, I would not have seen them; instead, I would have seen the city of stone.

Of course as soon as I descended from the bus I was overcome by a wave of sickness as the earth rushed its brown and green mass in my face. Hastily I reduced my magnification by half. I could only just walk now. I walked straight into George Lee who had been waiting at the bus stop.

—Angela will be livid, he said.

I apologised and said I’d had an attack of motion sickness.

—Angela will be livid.

—Yes, my eyes do trouble me at times.

He was immense and ugly and his green flecked sports jacket lay in the corner of my eye like a public park which moved every time he moved his arm in walking.

—Angela will be livid.

He pointed to the small villa, something of the same construction as the Foster’s small house but, presented to me, it waved in my face like a patchwork quilt. Again I modified my magnification and I was pleased to find it was just comfortable enough for me to be received as a visitor without my alarming my hosts by making too many defensive gestures and confused movements in the face of the oncoming material world, which was not now in focus, so that it moved perpetually, although it had a tendency to aggressive looming.

Liz Lee was waiting at the gate.

—Angela will be livid, George said to her.

—I’m glad it was on time, she said. —Come into the house.

I admired the view.

—How can houses be built here so high up the mountain? I asked.

—Angela will be livid, George explained.

—Yes, Liz continued. —By donkeys; everything was brought up that way, it was the only means of transport in those days.

Her face was freshly made up like a garden, red lips, red cheeks and blue around her eyes; it was new makeup, but I could see that of yesterday, the day before, the month before, the year before, going back I suppose to the seven years when the skin is reported to be changed, like linen.

Her gestures were eager, quick; her eyes bright; she was the middle-aged woman (she was fifty-six, I knew, and he was sixty-six), full of energy which fed her the illusion of being young. She had busy, narrow arms, and elbows that jerked about like angled branches in a fierce wind. She had been described to me as a ‘dynamo’.

He was almost bald. His face was flushed, his eyes a little confused and his mouth seemingly without any power, which made his speech unintelligible, as I have described. Liz understood what he said and understood that his listeners were confused, therefore she was inclined to explain his longer speeches.

After a while, instead of the usual ‘Angela will be livid’, I was able to discern the words ‘old’ and ‘retired’.

When the teacups had been set out (those flower-bordered craters) on their saucers (truly
soucoupes volantes
!) and filled with clay and hot water which was stirred with a spoon (a silver garden implement), and I had admired the house and the view, and pointed to one or two books on the bookshelf (a cliff with ordered crevices neatly filled with brown gold and red bricks which opened and were leaved with rectangular white sheets,
deux place
, double sheets, starched and stained where some child or children had evidently played a curious game of catching flies and other small insects, breaking off their legs and antennae, and arranging them in rows upon the bedsheets, then pressing them, one sheet upon the other, so that they emerged in orderly rows, resembling a cipher), and we had begun to drink our tea, Liz and George, working together to get the highest degree of intelligibility, explained that they wondered if they had made a mistake in coming to live on a mountainside at their time of life. Physical ills were besetting them. The city was so far away; everything was beginning to seem out of reach. It depressed George. Liz made sure that she traced the source of depression to George. She felt more optimistic.

—Angela will be livid, George said. —Old, retired.

Liz agreed.

—It’s not easy to come out from England and retire here, giving up your pension, living in a foreign land.

—Angela will be livid.

—Yes, and on a mountain-side with so far to go for supplies and the winters getting colder and the shortage of petrol. And the ills of approaching age.

Clearly both felt they had made a mistake but they were powerless to change it, almost as if they had given birth to their mistake and now it had become a separate being which they could not touch or influence; all they could do was claim ownership of it.

One enjoyment, however, was the English library where George and Liz acted as voluntary librarians when the library was open three times a week in an anteroom of the English church.

—Angela will be livid. Old, retired.

—Yes, it’s a great satisfaction, Liz interpreted.

Then she leaned towards me, like a doll-tower with her garden face and decaying olive-tree hair.

—What about you? You know I’m Head of the Welcoming Committee?

—Yes, you met me at the station.

—Did I? So I did. So I did. It seems so long ago. Are you settling down? Working?

—More or less.

—You will have seen that apartment, quite self-contained, that we have on the second floor? We never go up there. We don’t care for the stairs. Living on a mountain-side is enough climbing for us. You would be welcome to live in it, Harry. Very welcome. Now that George can’t always get into town, it would be company for him to have someone living upstairs. We’d love to have you. I think we met Rose Hurndell once when we were here years ago. A pretty little thing.

—I thought she was quite tall.

—She wasn’t, was she, George? Wasn’t Rose Hurndell thin and quite small?

—Angela will be livid, George said, helping himself to a triangular bandage of bread packed with sardines.

—I must be thinking of someone else. George says she
was
quite tall. One didn’t know, then, that she would be so famous. She was living with Louise Markham, a bit of an Amazon, don’t you think?

—
Her time is her own
, I said slyly.

—Time?

Liz suddenly became agitated.

—Both George and I have this feeling that time has cheated us.

Instantly she seemed to regret what she was saying, at least to regret her expression of her feeling.

She was about to say something further, then she sighed and said, vaguely, —You know.

In the words she uttered,
you know
, she put, because she could not bear to say it, a feeling of nothingness.

I did know.

To have lived so long with time and to find, when one thought one had
all the time in the world
, that time had deserted, disappeared.

I knew she did not mean to convey that time was short, that now they had retired they found themselves feeling their age and thinking of death and perhaps preparing for it and realising that their time on earth alive was almost finished. She meant that time had abandoned them, had been unfaithful in its myth which had given them faithful attendance as far as they could remember. There was
no
time now. Like a vanished occupant of a favourite chair, or room or seat in the sun, it left an emptiness which itself had become the intolerable if contradictory presence of nothingness. The lie had discovered them before they discovered the lie.

—You
do
know, don’t you?

I told her, yes, I did know.

—And will you come to live in the apartment? You can catch the bus each day to the Memorial Room – I believe that a condition of the Fellowship is that you work in the room once or twice a week.

—Yes. But I have somewhere to stay, thank you. I’ve moved to the Foster’s small villa.

They were angry, as I had sensed that the Watercresses, the Markhams, had been angry.

—Everyone is offering me a place to live, I said.

—The others too? The Watercresses, the Markhams?

—Yes.

Liz frowned.

—Angela will be livid, George said. Then he added, —Old, retired.

The library performed a similar function to the English church – it gathered together the exiles who had left England partly because they did not wish to be gathered together but who had changed their mind once they had arrived on the Côte d’Azur, settled in their retirement homes or apartments, redecorated and furnished the interior, cleaned up and planted the garden, and then sitting back to enjoy the arrival of the long-anticipated time for living, found that it was late, or it had been and gone, or it was only a dream. Instead, they saw the empty white winter sky, the bare hostile mountains, Italian and French, and another country’s ocean, and olive trees, palm trees, orchards lit with oranges and lemons, all of which they had known as visitors before they chose their place of retirement, and which they’d looked forward to seeing daily and possessing. Gradually they became aware of the changed relationship, of the intrusions of intimacy which adoption, of a person or a place, forced upon the new parent, of responsibilities and shames such as members of a family feel, of frustrations and longings for release that are part of the feeling towards a native land. And this, with no rescue or assistance from the benevolent promised time.

It was at that stage the exiles began going to the church and the library and the British Association. They began ‘taking tea’ at four each day in one another’s homes. They drew apart from the French community and became a tolerated eccentric ‘little England’. No one should have been startled, on entering the English library between the hours of nine and eleven on Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday morning, to find a collection of elderly men and women fumbling their way through book titles on dimly lit shelves (
The Egyptian Campaign
,
Italian Journey
,
The Great Generals
and so on), while talking to one another in Oxford accents, dropping names and sentences like, ‘When I was at Magdalen’, ‘I knew him at Cambridge’, ‘The Vicar says…’, nor alarmed to hear an elderly man or woman exclaim, ‘Give me something light, a detective novel’ (from the rows and rows of much-read paperback crime fiction), ‘anything to pass the time. I just don’t want to think.’

You’d have thought they would be thankful, as speaking of ‘passing the time’ showed that time was a reality, waiting for them; their problem, however, was to creep past in anonymity; they did not want, they could not bear to have the time for which they had made a contract with their leisure lives.

Among the small company you’d usually find George and Liz Lee, Liz energetically behind the desk, checking books in and out, George writing out receipts for subscriptions; Haniel and Louise Markham, though Haniel was seldom at home and spent much of his time in Paris; Dorset and Elizabeth Foster who, however, were not regarded as ‘true’ members of the English community who, when speaking of them, added in a superior tone, ‘They’re New Zealanders’, which translated meant, ‘They’re not one of us’.

Also, during the time I write of, you’d find the Watercresses in the library – Connie, Max, Michael and Grace, usually searching for information about a topic which Max or Connie or Michael or (less often) Grace had decided was worth writing an article about, and they must all four get down to it. Michael’s apprenticeship was being carefully encouraged. The Watercresses were not regarded as outsiders. They knew the members of the English community. They had visited the Côte d’Azur often. They had sent Michael to university at Aix-en-Provence to improve his French and soak up the French culture, and he had worked as a waiter at the Hotel Eugenia, in the tourist season. Also, they had founded the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship. And finally, they knew how to pronounce ‘Menton’. Elizabeth Foster, even as Rose Hurndell’s sister, did not have the prestige of the Watercresses.