The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  It was a pleasant walk. The birds sang and the shade under the trees tempered the heat. I could see a herd of deer a little way off, all of them lying calmly at rest. A family of rabbits grazed; I walked so softly I did not disturb them. I walked with such unwary joy, and a deeper feeling of peace, that I did not notice the corner till I had rounded it, nor that the light had fled and given the forest back to Night. I must hasten back to the chestnut tree. That stood by the road, at least. I might even chance upon a late-travelling waggoner who would carry me to Myrah. I turned in my tracks and was confronted by the terrible marriage of oncoming night and the forest’s own shadows. The tranquil animals were gone with the sun.

  Soon I came to a parting of ways, one I did not remember. Surely I had walked along the only track? I took the left fork, certain that it led in the direction of the tree at the Y. I walked fast and held my head high. I did not look behind me nor to right or left. The track led me on but I never found the chestnut tree, only another division of roads. This time, in near-panic, I took the right-hand fork. And so continued, faster, left then right, alternately cursing myself for a fool and praying for my own safety

  because soon there must be a junction at which the girl could safely be set down to continue her journey. Then, free of her, he would also be released from his unlovely desires. Men found themselves in court for less.

  The road was sunlit and empty. It wound below steep vineyards and above a little stream buried in dusty summer boskage: he should be enjoying this, not behaving like a guilty fugitive. But she – he glanced – looked happy enough.

  The morning, which was almost afternoon, had continued difficult. Leaving behind them the shabby hotel and the simpleton taking the air on its steps, he had explored Avallon with Alice. They came to a busy café, sat at a pavement table and ordered pastries and lemon tisanes. He did his duty, and bought a picture postcard of Avallon to send his wife.

  ‘What’s the date?’ he asked Alice.

  ‘June 25th – Wednesday, all day.’

  ‘Of course. Yesterday went on for ever.’

  A red currant from the barquette she had eaten was stuck to Alice’s upper lip. It looked like a glistening drop of blood. He leaned across the table and wiped it away with his handkerchief.

  ‘I’ll go and ‘phone Dad.’

  ‘Do you know how – in French?’

  ‘I do, Guy. Yes,’ she said confidently. She left him and went into the café. In her absence he contemplated her, the little he knew: When he’d asked her the date a faint frown had appeared, and quickly cleared from her brow. He could imagine that frown in class as she worked at her lessons; he could visualize inky fingers, the rows of girls, the uniforms.

  Quickly, untidily, he wrote bland platitudes on the postcard and addressed it.

  He was startled from a second reverie when Alice swung out of the café. The first thing he noticed was the length of her legs, brown in the daylight against the white of her shorts. Perhaps she wore these briefest of coverings on the tennis courts at school?

  She sat down opposite him and played with the packets of sugar in the bowl.

  ‘Have you finished your postcard?’

  ‘Yes – I’ll post it now, before I forget.’

  ‘Poor old man!’

  ‘Alice?’ Now he would ask the question. ‘Alice, how old, exactly, are you?’

  She smiled, not innocently.

  ‘Fifteen,’ she said.

  ‘Come on! You must be seventeen – at least. Don’t tease.’

  ‘I was born on April the first, nineteen seventy-five.’

  ‘Come on!’ he’d said again, angrily.

  So now they were driving, nearly parallel with the auto-route it was true, but seemingly deeper and further into the French countryside.

  ‘Where does this road go?’ he asked. ‘Look at the map.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Parados.’

  It took her moments. She was very quick – both to start a hare or follow one up.

  ‘It goes to your village, the one you’re looking for – Coeurville.’

  ‘But I was going to drop you somewhere – where you could get another lift!’

  ‘It’s OK. It’s only Wednesday.’

  ‘I am going to visit an old friend.’

  ‘It’s OK, I said. I’ll stay in the car.’

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Yes, Mr Parados.’

  He ignored her.

  ‘Fuck, my bloody hands are hurting like buggery.’

  They were there, had arrived in Coeurville. Automatically, he had slowed the car when they passed the sign. He drove sedately into the square. His sudden blast of irritation was gone with the bad language, though the tendons still ached. He was purged and limp.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alice.’

  ‘’S all right. Temperamental writer!’

  He parked. The place was deserted, the shops and the café shut, though a battered table, under which an old dog slept at full stretch, seemed to await visitors. Guy got out of the car and prowled the square, conscious that he was the anomaly; he and the red machine. Alice too had got out of it and was wandering on the far side of the square, peering into dark windows and the openings of shady passage-ways. She looked as though she belonged, a composed French girl dreaming out the heat. He sighed. Her hair shone in the sun, all the long length of it. She needs a boy, he thought, one of those tawny young lions one sees prowling at the sea-side, someone who won’t be irritated by her silliness.

  In the centre of the square, a war memorial rose out of a bright bed of magenta and scarlet petunias. He went closer to it. It was unusual. Three figures, Victory, Hope and Liberty lay one upon the other, and Victory, who flourished a sword, pressed Hope (to death it seemed) beneath him, while the figure of Liberty, far from being the usual resplendent Marianne, lay at the bottom of the heap and was angular and distressed. He glanced again at Alice, paused now outside the shuttered café. He saw a blind fly up, and the glass door opening. Alice disappeared inside.

  Then he was alone in the silent square. He looked around him once more and willed the village to awake, but nothing stirred except the dog which got to its feet and also disappeared inside the café. The shop next to it was a general ironmonger’s and then came the bakery and patisserie. That was all, except for the butcher’s shop on his left, where a small horse’s head sign indicated that this particular butcher killed and cut up horses. He went to find Alice.

  She was speaking in French to a woman, something about a gypsy, ‘la romanicelle’, the Romany woman: she was asking the way to Helen’s house. In Avallon, apart from one hesitant ‘Merci’, she had let him do all the talking and to hear her now, with laughter and complicity in her voice, fluently conversing, shocked him more than had her precocious sexuality. Of course she would, with a father resident in the country. A cup of black coffee stood on the counter in front of her and, as he came in, she turned to him and smiled and the French woman began to prepare another coffee.

  ‘You haven’t far to go,’ said Alice in English. ‘It’s the old presbytery and it’s just by the church.’

  ‘Helen’s house?’

  ‘Yes. The fortune-teller’s house. She is well-known here – ask Madame.’

  He spoke to the woman: ‘Good day, Madame,’ he said in French. ‘She tells me you know Helen Lacey – la voyante?’

  The woman, who had a broad, strong face, turned and looked him in the eye. ‘Hélène, Mme Dinard, yes,’ she said. ‘The girl is correct. Yes, the fortune-teller. A suitable profession for a gypsy, but – she owes everything to that man.’ She put his cup of coffee on the counter.

  He lifted the cup and drank gratefully, feeling the warmth of the liquid flowing through him and the ache ebbing from his hands.

  ‘She is married?’

  ‘You can call it marriage.’

  ‘To Georges Dinard?’

  ‘Yes. The butcher, there – the horse butcher.’

  Alice gently touched him. ‘You go,’ she said, �
��and I’ll wait here. It will be better.’

  ‘Wait in the car if you have to. It isn’t locked. Here –’ He gave her a two hundred franc note. She suddenly hugged him and kissed him on the lips.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And, by the way, I am seventeen – last April.’

  He left her in the café and walked swiftly across the square and along the dappled street, where lime trees grew in dry beds between the pavement and the road, until he came to the church. That ‘Thank you’ of hers – it had been like a farewell, a kind of ‘Thanks for everything’. He had no idea if she were now telling the truth about her age.

  The church looked abandoned. It was neglected and weeds grew on the roof. There was absolutely no sound, no notices, no indication that it was ever used. The door was shut and locked. He’d forgotten this was usual. The key would be lodged in some obscure house miles away. He thought of entering the church. Not to pray, God no, but as an interval, a break in the journey between Alice and Helen.

  Beyond the church, a pair of scarred stone pillars marked the entrance to the Old Presbytery. He wondered where the priest lived now; perhaps, as in his own village, in a new house.

  The gates were open; sagged, in fact, on lax hinges against dark evergreens. He walked up the short pathway to the front door and lifted his hand to the bell, noticing as he rang it how the paint lay flaked and twisted on the wood, weathered into many shades of green. He felt a hot quietude swell and billow towards him from inside the house, a silence made absolute by the noise of the bell. If, after all this, there was no one at home! He listened. He waited; glanced to right and left. Like those in the square, these tall windows were closely shuttered.

  Treading carefully, like an animal which wishes to hide, he crept to the nearest pair of shutters and pulled on one of them. The window behind it was open and, as he peered in, the smell of the house came to meet him, a blend of dusty warmth, stale incense, roses and her perfume, ‘Sortilège’. The dusky room was crowded with large pieces of furniture and he felt a child’s dread: some other place that he remembered intervened between the room before him and his present intentions. His mother’s house had also been crammed with massive pieces of oak and mahogany; but here were also statues, two gilded and oddly decadent humaniform lamp-bearers, an Ethiopian dwarf and an Egyptian hawk-headed god; and a bronze nude who concealed her pudendum with a caressing hand. The rose-scent came from a bowl of spent and faded beauties whose petals lay scattered on the floor.

  He withdrew; pushed the shutter to. Perhaps at the back of the house –

  There was no one in the garden at the rear. A mulberry tree filled up most of the yellowed lawn; the flowers in the long beds drooped in the heat and roses scrambled, overtopping a wall. He saw that a part of the area he had first taken for scorched grass was a yellow towel, and walked up to it. Someone had been sunbathing there: a tube of sun cream lay by the towel and the towel itself was spotted with what at first he took for blood, the juice of the mulberries. For a moment he considered the pleasures of eating ripe mulberries in such an advantageous position – they might drop into a waiting mouth – then, looking up into the tree, saw that the mulberries were still green. The stains, then? He shrugged inwardly, turned and walked toward the house.

  A porch with benches in it shaded the back door and on one of them stood a red-splashed mixing-bowl. The door itself was open; beyond it a shadowy hall with the inside of the front door at the far end, stairs, open doors to left and right. Guy raised his hand to knock.

  He saw Daniel, his second son, walking towards him and was bewildered. Reality intervened; comprehension.

  ‘Dominic,’ he said. ‘You are Dominic?’

  (What would he say, the tall fair-headed boy – Helen’s son – his son – the true love child?)

  ‘Hi, Dad!’

  Guy was shocked: the accent was American. But now the boy was close. What should he have said: ‘My son, my son!’ with tears – of joy? He held his arms out in a gesture of welcome. This boy was taller than Daniel – already. And two years younger? His brain made frantic calculations and Dominic, smiling from Helen’s fathomless brown eyes, walked into his embrace. Kisses, one, two, three – he was almost French. Dominic smiled properly, his teeth virginal and even against his year-round skier’s tan.

  ‘Mom said you’d be here today,’ he said. ‘She was in the yard, in the garden.’

  Guy, overcome at last and assailed by the lost legions of the past, spoke carefully.

  ‘I am very glad to see you.’

  (He has my nose and build, he thought. The rest is Helen.)

  ‘Great. No problem.’ At least he sounded like a normal teenager. ‘Would you like a drink?’

  ‘Er, no. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Later then? You want to see Mom.’

  ‘I do want to see your mother. Very much.’

  ‘And you’re worried. I’m what you hoped for, but I’m not. I learned my spoken English from Georges. He was in Chicago for a while.’

  ‘Georges?’

  ‘Ma’s Lilo.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Live-in-lover. You know.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. The butcher.’

  ‘That’s him, the horse-butcher. She’s in the vardo. You can go there if you like. It’s in the orchard, there’s a gate in the garden wall. See you later!’

  A fleeting memory of Alice Tyler jumped at him, and was gone. He forgot her. He was wholly lost, as helpless as he had been years ago, when he had first seen Helen on a country bus and, dismounting at her stop, had followed her – home, as he thought, but actually down a long and winding lane which led eventually into the secretive valley of the little river Char. She had stopped on the pack-horse bridge and waited for him –

  Soon afterwards the worst and best ten months of his life had begun.

  Now, seventeen years later, he was walking to her through a sunlit afternoon garden in France.

  He had wanted to fuck her there and then, in the February snows beside the river, but she, taking him by the hand, had led him to the black-painted vardo in the old cattle-drift, had made him her apprentice. Had made him her slave. It wasn’t till June –

  He opened the door in the garden wall. A skewbald horse was grazing in the orchard. The sleeping van, the vardo, stood a little way away, close beside a cherry tree. Ripe fruit brushed its curving roof. It was identical with the original, the one which had burned; an exact copy, down to the golden suns and moons around the door. He panicked. The van was so much like.

  Her face, as dark and perfect as it had been that first time, rose up in the doorway. She still had her incredible cataract of hair. It fell straight down from a centre parting and then curled upon her shoulders like water rebounding: the sign of a gypsy sorceress. She leaned upon the half-doors and watched him approach. She said nothing. He trembled in his expensive canvas shoes. She is still dressed, he thought, in that crazily beautiful mix of antique clothes: she is the epitome of a gypsy-woman.

  Helen looked down at him.

  ‘You always come when I call,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t mock me. I came to see Dominic.’

  ‘Yes! You came to see the boy.’

  Her voice had deepened a little, against his memory.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, and opened the doors. He stepped up into the van. The interior was dim and heavily perfumed. Her crystal ball and tarot cards lay on the folding table and her lucky chank shell stood on the shelf above the bed; the paperbacks were there as well and, incredibly, a soft leather-covered manuscript book which looked very like the diary of Lèni la Soie. He admired the turned and carved woodwork, the shiny stove and the patterned china; the lace edgings on the sheets and the crocheted bedspread.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘It looks the same –’

  ‘It is the same.’ She gave no explanation but seated herself on the bed and waved a hand toward her chair. He sat down.

  ‘Now, welcome, Guy. The years between us have vanished
today. Our son has brought us both here.’

  ‘He is a fine young man.’

  ‘He was born of a sorceress and fathered by a story-teller. Would he be ordinary?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  Helen stood up to light the oil lamp upon the cupboard. She lifted the lit lamp down and held it by its heavy base; the yellow light illuminated her dark skin and made it glow like burnished bronze. Guy could not see a mark or a line upon her face. Her lips were as softly full as they had been when she was only twenty-two.

  ‘I am thirty-nine, Guy. Am I still beautiful?’ she asked him.

  He breathed in and held the breath a long moment.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, eventually, when he had studied her as if she were the Mona Lisa or one of Titian’s heavenly nudes. ‘Yes. The only thing which has changed is your voice. It has become melodious, a contralto holding your every experience.’

  ‘Good. Do you love me, Guy?’

  He could not find a ready answer to this question, and hesitated. She intervened.

  ‘Oh, I know you have “loved” a lot of women.’

  He still could not find an answer but, groping in his mind for words, found one he thought might do.

  ‘I certainly love my memory of you – but when the vardo was burned: at first, I thought you had died in it.’

  ‘The police did not discover my remains!’

  ‘But you had gone. I had to reconstruct my life. There was a void in it.’

  ‘I am glad you no longer love me, Guy, for I have lived with Georges Dinard for nearly ten years and it seems like eternity.’

  ‘You brought me all the way to France to tell me that?’

  ‘As you said, you have come to visit Dominic.’

  Helen set the lamp on the table and sat close by him on the locker top. He stared at her face, and its shadow which the lamplight threw high up the wall. Her beauty was supernatural; he had never seen another woman close on forty with a face like that. There was no artifice about it, no cutting or stretching, no clever making-up. It was the face of a young woman, and as such puzzled him. She divined his thoughts.