In the Memorial Room

by Frame, Janet

  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 oversight 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.

  4

  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.

  Half-waking I heard the barking of a hundred guard dogs in the villas on the mountain-side, as if a pack of chiens de chase had broken loose, as I’d read that morning in the newspaper they had done, and set upon their master, an old man in a mountain village, and devoured him, and I heard them coming nearer and still I could see nothing but the second layer, if you will, of blessing of green life, which was fire, and I struggled, and the slats on the green garden seat felt like stakes pressed against my back; then suddenly, I think with the dropping of the real wind, the barking of the dogs ceased, my eyes cleared, and in my dream I found myself looking at a painting, a French comte and two hunting dogs – how still they seemed – captured and framed in the painting; they were the huge black dogs that walking beside a man have their heads on a level above his thighs and inspire fear and certain feelings of excitement associated with killing and loving; they walk like allies, equals. I am afraid of violence, in myself and in others. A sweat of relief broke out on my face when I saw the dogs were held within the painting; the stillness was not to be believed.

  I woke. The desolate sighing of the wind had ceased. The sun had gone down. I thought I must have been asleep for hours. All the colours of the world had grown a shade more sombre and a penetrating chill had fallen from the mountain peaks.

  Hastily I shut the windows and the doors of the Rose Hurndell Memorial Room and hurried back to my apartment. In the gas-smelling cooking coin I made myself a cup of coffee.

  The next day when I saw Connie and Max Watercress for lunch at a café down by the beach Connie asked, —Have you seen it?

  I thought for a moment she was talking of the new comet which everyone had been hoping to glimpse as it was supposed to droop its tail over the Côte d’Azur at six the previous evening.

  —No, I couldn’t see it, I said. —I think it’s a hoax.

  A defensive, determined light, which I was to grow used to, came into Connie’s eyes.

  —I don’t think that’s the way to talk of the Memorial Room.

  I was apologetic.

  —No, no, I was thinking of the comet. Yes, I’ve seen the room.

  —Did you feel Rose Hurndell there?

  A lustful thought came to me and I couldn’t help smiling. Then I cleared my throat.

  —Oh yes. The place reminds me of a grave.

  Again the defensive light appeared in Connie’s eyes.

  —It’s been neglected of course but they’ve promised alterations for this year. Water, toilet, electricity, and so on.

  —I shan’t be able to work there, I said. —I work long hours and it’s not suited to long hours, without facilities.

  —Still, when the improvements are made, Max said.

  —Yes, when the improvements are made, Connie said.

  —Yes, of course.

  —It’s important that you be there, feel the presence. You do like her work?

  —Yes, yes, I do.

  —I’m so glad. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that she actually lived and worked here, that she went to the Monaco Oceanographic Museum one day, she mentions it in a letter, I believe her sister is preparing her letters – oh and you must meet Haniel and Louise Markham, they’ll tell you so much about her. Her favourite colour was red. That shows life, doesn’t it? From the very first moment I read her books I knew: here is a genius. My brother knew her mother, you know.

  —Did he?

  —We come here every year, on the anniversary of her death, in October, to put a wreath of red flowers and leaves in the Memorial Room. There’s a small ceremony. Later, when improvements are made, we’ll have a glass case in the room, with two of her notebooks (one has no writing in it but it’s the kind she always bought, from Woolworths) and a handkerchief, some early photos, a copy of a certificate won at primary school for the best long jump – Long Jump Champion, just imagine! I think it was twenty-two feet long…

  —Twenty-one, dear, Max corrected.

  —I don’t remember exactly. But it tells something about her, don’t you think?

  I agreed.

  —There’s to be a reading of her works here, in October.

  —I shall miss it, I said regretfully.

  —We’ll be here. And Michael and Grace are coming. Michael is going to cover it for his newspaper in England. He’s doing so well with his writing. He’s not written a book yet, but the discipline will come to him, in time. Every morning all four of us straight after breakfast sit down to do our stint. Don’t we?

  They had apartments side by side in a gracious old building.

  —Yes. Grace has written ten poems too, you know, and published two books. When they get settled there’ll be no stopping them.

  —I suppose not, I said.

  The next morning I called in to see the Watercresses on my way to the bank (there’d been some problem with the arrival of my scholarship money) and I found the working in action. I hesitated to interrupt. Connie and Max had rented for a month a large apartment with all facilities including hot water and a bath, a bedroom and a living room and kitchen. Grace and Michael, next door, had one large room and all facilities. This morning all were seated around the large oval table in the big sitting-room. Each had a large white sheet of paper, and in the centre of the table were two boxes of coloured crayons. All four were busily drawing.

  I observed them. Max, in his late seventies, was of rather stout build, with rosy face and military moustache. When he walked his bearing was military, and his accent was English. I’d been told (to my anticipa
tory horror) that he’d had an operation on his eyes and wore glasses that were a kind of magnifying lens, so that when one looked at his eyes one saw huge brown dog-like orbs that in their magnification revealed the slightest wave of emotion. I had a sense of unreality thinking of him with his repaired eyes and I with my failing sight and sometimes getting myself into the frame of mind where he and I were brothers, or father and son, that anyway we shared an unusual condition and therefore should have special insight into each other. I saw in him only his love for and pride in his son. When he looked at Michael, if you observed closely, you could see the magnified brown eyes quivering with love; they would grow moist with their love and pride.

  As far as Max was concerned Michael was the genius, the writer – well, the talented young man who could be (it was not yet the time in his life when one said ‘could have been’) a writer, or a painter (‘he’s always been good at drawing and painting’) or a composer and musician (‘he has perfect pitch, he nearly took a music degree, he has composed hundreds of songs and pieces of music’). Michael’s talents were indeed impressive and every time I was with his parents I was made conscious of them.

  I watched Connie, bent over her sheet of paper, drawing with a large blue crayon, absorbed in her work. Her face was permanently pale with the kind of makeup which suppresses colour in the cheeks. Her cheekbones were high and rather narrowed her small blue eyes. She too was stockily built and dressed usually in a tweed costume such as New Zealand women wear to the horse races at Addington and Avondale, and her evening wear to the receptions and dinners for the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow was usually a dress of dark shimmering material, and she carried a small spangled evening bag. Her hands, grasping the crayon, were plump and floury. When she spoke, French or English, she spoke slowly, almost mechanically, with a swaying motion of her body as if she had within her some instrument for winding her words, in sentence-containers, up from a great depth where they had fallen or been banished; sometimes one felt as if they were extracted with difficulty, as if she herself had gone away down into the rock to hack them out and shake them clean – a long slow process which made her listeners impatient: usually Max or Michael took over the telling of a long story when the words to fit it appeared to be growing scarce.