The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  A wave of guilt passed through him, winding the tension up: he exercised his taut hands once more. He had said nothing to Jilly. No need.

  His son’s final sentences were the most arresting, the ones he had been fed: ‘I am to tell you that Mother knows you are a handsome and successful storyteller who has learned all the skills of life and loving. She longs to confirm in the flesh what she has read.’ Then, the clincher, the reiteration of the announcement which had driven him to finish his book and set off for the unknown: ‘Your son, Dominic’.

  Yesterday. All was yesterday.

  Yesterday, when the painters had at last gone home and left the stinging smell of gloss paint behind them, evening had enveloped the stuffy house, wrapping it in a pause, an interval of quiet. For a while no vehicle had passed on the road beyond the wide lawn with its twin cedars and monkey-puzzle. The heat was Capricornian, tropical: a bath in which he was immersed to be boiled gently, to be done to a turn. It summoned unlikely longings to lie with ice-maidens or with the cruel Snow Queen; to plunge into the eternal cold, there forever to die; to have no identity, to be himself no longer.

  To be, he had thought, to be nothing, nil, no more man but flesh, dead meat decaying to the bone and then to earth, all one with what was and will be.

  The smell of paint and turps had been pervasive and perhaps accounted for the light-headedness he had felt; he was mildly poisoned, a middle-aged solvent-sniffer. He had sat by the open study window and watched the shadows gather beneath the rose bushes. The house remembered, its garden a notebook on whose pages many had sketched their designs. The gold and white pillar-rose marked the place where he had first seen Alice Naylor, knowing who she was, and the memory of it to this day lingered with him, a corrupt but sweet odour which counterpointed his memories of her whose brief life had been brought abruptly to a premature close by the hangman’s noose. He had lost count of the times he had seen Alice as she walked about the Old Rectory, or sat quietly on an invisible stool in the very heart of her enemy, the Church Victorious’s camp. Her face – which death had drained of all colour – always wore an expression of profound terror and about her neck was a purple scar, where the hangman’s rope had bitten her.

  He had turned quickly from these painful memories to the other story, the fiction on the computer screen. One or two paragraphs were needed before the final lines he had already composed. He had forced his hands to type.

  The frenetic mood, which had overtaken him at the start of the summer and remained with him, had subsided. He leaned back in the chair and took deep lungfuls of the hot and stale air. The ship vibrated as her engines turned; she stirred and trembled as no car ever could, almost alive, wanting to be under way – this most ordinary cross-Channel ferry. Sunlight slanted into his eyes and he masked them with his sunglasses.

  How is it that I let myself be troubled by the past? He sank once more into yesterday, physically conscious of his hands. He remembered his initial panic at the intermittent ache: Is it a symptom of the advancing years? Must I learn to live with this neural gnawing, toothache of the tendons; appreciate it for what it is, my particular and personal infirmity, my own mnemonic for mortality – a pocket vanitas or portable skull-surmounted tomb. The escapement shudders, the sands run faster through the glass isthmus – Is it arthritis? Something worse? Incurable? The shadow that stalks us all.

  Sandy’s explanation was small comfort. Three initials, RSI, encompassed and explained his ills.

  In the car last night his hands had kept troubling him. He had tried to forget the pain on the motorway; to lose it in speed – always being ready for the police in their unmarked cars. It was a short stretch before ‘Christminster’ flashed up its exit number and he fled around the intersection roundabouts and drove more sedately along the Badbury Road.

  That way, you missed the dreaming spires. Unless? God damn his habit of turning every thought inside out to discover its psychic symbolism. But fucking Sandy was easy: she gave as good as she got; and he had been in need. He parked the Audi behind her Escort and opened the garden gate. There were shadows on the kitchen blind and he was about to put his key in the lock when a peal of female laughter from the open window made him cautious. He rang the bell: Dr A.F. Mayhew – my literate sex therapist, my sensual D Litt, he thought, and smiled.

  His mistress, merry and flushed, opened the door.

  ‘Guy! Good heavens!’ she said. ‘It isn’t Tuesday is it?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Sandy,’ he said, irritably. ‘I’m not a dental appointment. And it’s Monday.’

  ‘Well, what do you want to do? I’ve a kitchen full of summer students – my American ladies. We’ve just opened a few bottles.’

  ‘I want to come in,’ he said, and did so. ‘Next, I want –’ He kissed her.

  ‘I don’t suppose they’ll miss me for a while,’ she said. ‘Mary’s showing them the video.’

  ‘Not blue movies in the suburbs!’

  ‘Really, Guy. It’s a record of their stay. They leave tomorrow.’

  Sandy’s waspish mood began to fail her. Guy was stroking as much of her as he could reach, in the narrow hall.

  They went up to the bedroom. The worn teddy which Sandy kept on her pillow annoyed him: a dumb and idiotic rival – which had been in bed with her many more times than he. He shoved it and it fell on the floor.

  ‘You brute,’ said Sandy. ‘Aah, mmm.’ Afterwards, he told her he was on his way to Dover, to the ferry. ‘“Prelude”,’ she said, ‘That’s what I like – as if you didn’t know.’ She got up and he slept. In the morning, she was there again beside him, ready to hit the button of the alarm before it shrilled.

  ‘Six fifteen, my God,’ she said, yawning. ‘I didn’t get rid of them until two. You’ve had a fine sleep, anyway.’

  ‘I needed it. I’ve been working hard. Ow!’

  He massaged his hands.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They ache. It’s worst when I wake.’

  ‘Poor chap! Have you been using your PC a lot?’

  ‘I don’t write in longhand!’

  ‘That’s what it is, then. RSI, Repetitive Strain Injury – like a sports injury. You’ve over-strained the tendons. The holiday will help – unless you start using the laptop.’

  ‘I didn’t bring it, just paper and pens. I might do some real writing, in my own hand.’

  ‘Instead of Times?’

  ‘New York actually. In the early days I did write everything in longhand. Then I typed it. It was the only way I could make sense of myself.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ she said. She was a lot younger than he and knew him only as a best-selling phenomenon, comfortably placed, and comfortably off – once, he had driven her through Maidford Halse, the Hantonshire village he had lived in for nearly thirty years, and she had glimpsed his house, bulky and solid with accrued respectability, across shady lawns.

  ‘I won the Christminster Prize for my first novel, Jack’s Tank – the story of a National Service recruit. It’s out of print now –’

  ‘I didn’t know – never guessed. What happened? What turned you into a Fantasisr?’

  ‘Sex,’ he said, and she laughed, but with some puzzlement. ‘A mortgage and a growing family – as you’ll find out yourself one day, when I’m history – or experience.’

  Telling this white lie was easier than attempting the convoluted tale of his past misdemeanours and haunting loves.

  ‘Couldn’t you have gone on with the serious stuff as well as the Mythologies?’

  ‘Authors of Eng Lit are supremely selfish,’ he told her. ‘Successful pulp novelists can afford to be generous to their families, and their mistresses into the bargain. Look at you: what paid for your abortion and the weekend at Le Manoir afterwards?’

  ‘Koschei’s Envy, I suppose. That was the last, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I finished The Making of Koschei before I drove here last night.’

  Sandy looked into his face.

  ‘Does it matter wh
at tale you tell,’ she said, ‘as long as you have the power to overwhelm your reader’s senses and hold him in your grip – for as long as the story lasts?’

  ‘In theory, no; in terms of monetary reward, yes. Tell me, Sandy, do you give your students in-bed tutorials? Must I write a dissertation before I get my oats?’

  He embraced and fucked her vigorously, quite certain that he demonstrated much more ardour and skill than a younger man; lay relaxed and satisfied across her and played with wisps of her titian hair (the colour was natural, unlike his wife’s).

  ‘You should get some Chinese balls,’ she said, dreamily.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Her comment startled him. He was not sure if she was joking, or criticizing his performance in some obscure female way.

  ‘Chain of thought,’ said Sandy. ‘Like these, look.’ She leaned from the bed and took from the bookshelf a small, cloth-covered box which she opened to disclose two silver balls resting on red velvet. ‘They keep your fingers supple, a kind of physiotherapy. Like this: roll them about on the flats of your hands. Might help your aches. Avis Dane swears by them. She’s a pianist and she uses hers every day to exercise her hands.’

  The balls rang softly as they travelled round her outstretched palms.

  ‘Bells too!’ said Guy. ‘Very dubious, one of these pseudo-scientific cures. I bet it has its origins in magic – or is an urban myth, like the Child Who Was Kidnapped At Disneyland, or the Phantom Hitch-hiker.’

  He tried to imitate her, bending and tilting his hands so that the balls rotated. It was hopeless. One after the other they slid off and landed with dull chimes on the bed.

  ‘There’s a lot of alternative medicine about – it works, too,’ said Sandy doggedly. ‘I take evening primrose oil for PMT. I suppose it’s a New Age thing – but real enough, not gypsy stuff.’

  ‘I used to know a gypsy well,’ he said, half to himself.

  ‘Mm?’

  Unwise to tell; and again, too complicated. Besides, he was sleepy.

  ‘Oh, nothing, thinking ahead,’ he said, pulling Sandy down beside him. She was warm; she was short and tucked neatly inside his embrace, like his wife – but was without Jilly’s middle-aged creases and sags, smooth, taut-limbed. Poor Jilly, away in the States being mauled by art-lovers. Her carvings were more exciting than she, these days – shouldn’t have had another child, so late. Could he remember Helen’s body? She had been – what? Years ago. Perfection, exact of proportion, well-endowed by Dame Nature or by one of those dead mother-goddesses she’d revered. He was on his way to see her. Possibly. And Dominic, their son. He slept and dreamed of a boy and a man, who both looked like himself; they fished in a bran tub and caught Christmas tree baubles and silver bells. Then he had to run: something huge and clanking rushed past him – he had to catch a train! He had to catch up with someone! ‘Helen! Wait for meeee!’ he cried, but his mouth was sewn shut with black thread. He jumped awake.

  ‘– time?’ he asked.

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘I’ll never catch that ferry now.’

  ‘Yes you will. You still have four hours.’

  Sandy, in her dressing gown, made breakfast for them. It was her kind of breakfast with yoghurt, muesli and freshly squeezed juice; usually, he delighted in the differences between her way of life and his own. Today, they irritated him. That Garfield poster above the fridge. Why on earth? – she was a bright girl. They had said goodbye lightly, and left a great deal unsaid.

  Coming to, he saw his fellow passengers about him, heard their incessant chatter and the magnified voices booming from the television overhead. He sat upright to massage his hands, imagining the strained tendons chafing in their narrow sockets. RSI. What a bugger, what a hollow laugh: he had a fashionable complaint. Last night he had needed sex; now he needed a drink.

  Guy Kester Parados, author (BA Christminster, Caster Cathedral School and Fawley College, born Alfrick-on-Severn 1941, married Jillian Meddowes, sculptor, 1962, six legitimate children and four illegitimate excluding two abortions and one miscarriage), went to the Camargue Lounge. Under his left arm he carried a copy of the Independent and two books, A Year in Provence and the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu. He wore jeans and an Armani tee-shirt. A linen jacket was slung across his shoulder. He was about six feet tall, with thick grey hair, grey or blue eyes, and was clean-shaven. He might have been any age between forty and fifty, although he was two months short of his forty-ninth birthday. He had no peculiar distinguishing marks and kept himself fit by playing cricket and by taking long country walks; had, in any case, no hereditary tendency to fat.

  He experienced some difficulty with the number of objects he carried and resolved his problem by stacking the books and paper on the bar while he removed his RayBan sunglasses. He ordered a pint of Theakston’s Ale. When it was served, he took it to a table by a window and nursed his glass. After putting on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, which gave him a bookish air and made him look suddenly older, he opened the paper and read steadily, scanning the headlines first before turning back to peruse the articles in detail. Occasionally, he took a drink from his glass. He looked up once to stare at a blonde girl who sat at a nearby table, shook his head and read on; again looked up, at the mural on the opposite wall of ibis making piebald patterns against a landscape of fluid sky and marshland.

  ‘I began building the year the Sacred Ibis left the marsh. The foundations were soon dug and the footings laid. It was, after all, a small building. Many years passed before my spiritual troubles began, coinciding with the first extensions.

  ‘A new building for a new decade (my third). I was full of hope and my plans for the future excited me almost as much as the architectural drawings themselves; and far more than the white hands which, joined in prayer and resting on the sill of the confessional, were all I could see of Nemione Sophronia Baldwin, the youngest daughter of the reeve.

  ‘I had almost resolved to leave the Order. Strict observance of the Rule was very hard for a young man of twenty who could control neither himself nor his dreams, which were of an explicitly sexual nature. Yet Nemione’s self-sacrificing patience was an object lesson to me. Though I was tempted to abjure my vows and join myself to a battalion of the Brotherhood of the Green Wolf, I resolved to remain at Espmoss for two more years of study and then take what came. My courage was not of a high order. My disordered infancy followed by a childhood spent learning the Rule had made fear a close companion. I had often been whipped, at school by the proctor, Baptist Olburn, and in the cloister by Brother Fox, the Disciplinarian. The contemplation of freedom seemed sin enough.

  ‘We were free in all other respects. That I was allowed to begin this building (now such a remarkable edifice, as you see!) demonstrates how liberal was the Rule toward ambition. I had successfully completed my years as altar boy and novice: my building and the beautiful drawings of it were a kind of reward. The lodge (it was too small in those days to be called a palace) would contain both past and present, that much was obvious but, before I laid one stone, I had a tantalizing decision to make: should I now commence to erect the walls – they were to be of the finest white marble – or should I forsake the dark footings while I designed and planted the gardens?

  ‘The reeve’s daughter wore a gold chain about her slender neck. A small gold cross hung from it, one of the symbols of our faith. The four arms of the cross represent the points of the compass, north, south, east and west, and thus, our world, both material and spiritual. The device also represents the many cross-roads which we will find ourselves paused at, during life, while we ponder a vital decision: which direction to take now?

  ‘I had come to such a node myself or, if the metaphor may be laboured a little more, stood simultaneously at two. I had chosen to ignore the one; the dilemma of the other, smaller problem, lodge or garden, I solved in an ingenious way: I would attempt both tasks at once, devoting the cool mornings to the garden and the afternoons, which the sun made warm and pleasant,
to the building. I determined to plant the equivalent of Nemione’s cross, our life, in my garden, and make it the basis of my design. This was difficult. Perhaps if I sited the building at the centre of the cross … but that precluded all additions. I might construct the cross-design in one’ quarter of the whole – such exquisite and nice considerations! The extensive gardens should both begin and complete my pleasure. The forbidden word again; it haunted me. A Green Wolf has every opportunity – is master of himself and of all the worldly delights I forbade myself. A Wolf would not linger in the cloister, hoping to catch a glimpse of Nemione. He would stride out to look for her.

  ‘I wanted to make nothing less than a shrine in which every object, animate or not, made spiritual sense. This is the reason for the incompleteness of the “wilderness” walks. They should be creations of artifice but I could not exclude such intruders as the wild rose and the coconut-scented gorse, nor these fine thistles and docks – and why waste genuine sports? I am even now too ambitious; and still too lazy to achieve all my ambitions.

  ‘Notwithstanding these outside imperfections, the interior of the building is, as you will see, in perfect order. We will climb the staircase (genuine porphyry – but mind the broken step!) and enter by the brazen doors which, yes, resemble more than a little the Gates of Paradise.’

  The old man took a key from the leather wallet he wore on his sword belt, fitted it to the lock and turned it.

  ‘I love to entertain my visitors (few enough) with such speeches,’ he said. ‘They are props to the ailing structures of my mind. As for the palace – here it is. I cannot escape from it. It has swallowed me whole, mind and body, hates and loves, possessions, beliefs, gold – that which glisters and is my fool’s reward and grail attained.

  ‘Since I am the one you never forget, it will be easier if I show you round. I’ll make you regret your memories of me! The grand tour I think, the one that takes in all the sights, leaves not a stone unturned. I do not have the resilience of some, not now. I lack the boldness of those outside.