by Frame, Janet
Grace, as one who had stolen the beloved son, knew her privileges; retelling Connie’s stories was not one of them. Grace, in this family setting, was the tolerated outsider whose slightest false move would change her to the enemy; the seeds of enmity had been planted with her arrival as Michael’s unofficial wife but the rain- and sun-making forces necessary for their growth had been imprisoned within the seasonless weatherless world of the parents’ love for or indulgence of their son. While they occupied themselves with their ambitions for life through the death of Margaret Rose Hurndell, they were preparing for the life of their son (and thus, ultimately their own lives) to obscure and obliterate both the life and death of Margaret Rose Hurndell. They offered Grace no share of these ambitions, particularly as she was evidently disinclined to bring forth a little half-Michael who could be used if the whole-Michael plans came to nothing. In the midst of these politics of permanence I felt as unsafe and foreign and brief as a mayfly out of season; or like someone who growing up in the world and acquiring all the skills necessary for survival, particularly the skill of finding some relation to the passing of time, with the kindly aid of darkness and light and the rhythm of the body and the use of clocks, suddenly finds his biological clock is broken and he is unable to read the meaning of a clock- or watch-face, and, worst of all, it is dark because his eyes are blind.
As I said, I did not interrupt the morning work of the Watercresses. I left quietly, taking with me a feeling of being menaced – I think it was when Max said au revoir and his huge eyes like the saucer-eyes of the guard dogs in the old tales seemed to detach themselves from his face and swim into the air, suspended there like huge tadpole-beginnings, frog-seeds. I said to myself I would need to keep a control over my so-called historical imagination!
5
For most of the first two weeks of my stay, beginning with the New Year, the weather was fine and gentle, the air clear blue and fresh, the mountains compositions of white light stark against the sky. People crowded the promenades each afternoon; the marinas were packed with visiting luxury yachts and smaller family boats from Belgium, Norway, Denmark; windows were opened; radios played louder; the huge construction works on the many immeubles caused the surrounding buildings to shudder with constant deafening activity of their machinery and the air to be filled with flakes of white dust as if from a construction-generated snowstorm.
Then suddenly one morning the Côte d’Azur woke to find itself forced to accept a share of the bitter winter weather, the wild storms that raged over the country, in hurricanes, avalanches, floods. The chill wind wailed and whistled, the breakers crashed over the promenades, the new apartment buildings, set with disastrous folly in stark-naked earth from which the trees hundreds of years old had been déraciné, began their slow inevitable movement downhill, with great cracks appearing in their walls and foundations and their topmost storeys leaning at a dangerous angle.
On these days of bitter cold and down-driving rain I went once or twice to the Memorial Room and sat huddled in the dank grave-like cold watching the wall of water tumbling from the terrace of the Villa Florita over the doorway of the Room like a cascade of unceasing tears. Then I’d return to my tiny squalid apartment and crouch by the radiator in the corner. At night I’d put all my clothes on the big double bed and creep under the thin blankets provided with the apartment, resting my head on the long sausage bolster, and listening to my transistor radio, its small white earpiece thrust in my ear. I cursed that I was a bachelor. What a dreary life an author’s life is, I thought. Then I’d sniff the current of gas that came my way from the toilet coin and then I’d switch off the radio and close my eyes, and then I’d remember my eyes, and wonder about them. Then I’d pray fiercely as people do as a last resort when they find themselves on a sinking boat or a crashing plane: God, please let me learn to know the darkness.
One morning, after such a night, instead of waking into the usual absence of pain, and ashamed of my prayer, I felt a burning pressure above my eyes as if my eyeballs were being forced back into my head, and the light, at first, pierced like splinters through my eyes. Gradually the objects in the room became clearer, but the pain persisting above and in my eyes; I made up my mind to consult the doctor whose address I had noted in case of emergency. Doctor Alberto Rumor, 10 Rue Henry Bennet, Menton. This was on the day when Dorset and Elizabeth Foster had arranged to take me to view their small villa with the prospect of my liking it well enough to rent it.
The day was stormy; the waves crashed over the promenade. I could hear the sound of the waves as I sat, my hands pressed over my eyes, to relieve the pain, waiting while Doctor Rumor, who had made a thorough examination of my eyes, reported his opinion which he hoped would be confirmed by the X-rays and blood tests he was arranging for me. He spoke English to such perfection that I became convinced that my own English was ‘broken’ and foreign. He was elderly, with rimless glasses, and a dust-coloured suit, with the coat flecked grey. His chin was full, above a mouth that one imagined was forever moving – either in speech gesture or in eating. Every now and again he made small noises of satisfaction, tasting noises, with his lips, like a chef getting the precise flavour of his cuisine. He wore a huge watch, like a navigating instrument, which he glanced at every now and again as if to orient himself on earth.
He smiled at me.
—Monsieur Gill, he said, —you may rest assured your eyesight is in perfect condition, as far as I am able to judge. I think the X-rays and the tests will confirm this.
—Yet I am in great pain, doctor, I said, adopting the formal English of the foreign student who learns from Cambridge University entrance papers of fifty years ago.
Dr Rumor leaned forward. I could discern a kind of excitement in his gesture.
—You display, he said, —the incipient signs of intentional invisibility.
—You mean I want to be blind?
—No, no. No, no. You are trying to make yourself invisible, on the childlike theory that if you can’t see, then you can’t be seen. Like a child who shuts his eyes and thinks no one can see him.
—I don’t believe it, I said, indignantly. —I’m not neurotic, hysterical, or whatever you call it. I’m a matter-of-fact person, my feet on the earth.
—A pied-à-terre only? He smiled. —Monsieur Gill, this disease is real. One would scarcely call it a disease, though. It is what is known as a collaborative condition. Are you a cooperative young man?
—Cooperative?
—Yes. Do you fall in with the plans of others, arranging yours to suit them? Do you try to avoid inconveniencing others? I think the expression is ‘putting others out’, isn’t it?
—Yes. I don’t like putting people out. I’m a quiet man. I like to get on with my work. I’m rather shy, a student, more interested in my studies and my writing than in social occasions. I’ve written two historical novels and I’m hoping, here, to write a third novel, I suppose what will be called an imaginative work as opposed to one that is historical.
Dr Rumor tasted the air about his lips.
—Understood. I see. I’ve not met a case like yours before.
I grew alarmed.
—Am I a case?
—Not entirely. You know history, Monsieur Gill. You know the history of the annihilation of races, and of annihilation carried out, il y avait une fois by geological biological meteorological epidemiological means, and of, from time to time, the planned annihilation of man or men by man or men. And you know the story of recent times.
—But what has this to do with me?
—Ah, they all said that.
—What do you mean?
—No matter. There’s another form of annihilation, obliteration, if you will, of a psychological nature, practised by human being upon human being. Usually the victim finds a point of resistance, his own line of defence as it were. In your case…
—My ‘case’?
—In your instance – par exemple – you are cooperating with your assassins.
> —Dr Rumor. This is absurd, I cried, pressing my hand once again over my eye as the pain became unbearable.
Dr Rumor was unmoved.
—There were known cases of this in mediaeval – and later – witchcraft in which people actually became invisible; en effet, ils ont fondu! Fondu! And you must know, Monsieur Gill, of those races of the world today which are psychologically invisible – it is only a few steps to complete invisibility. Monsieur Gill, I know nothing of your life but what you have told me. I can do nothing for you. You are not ill, you are not going blind, you are a sane man, I believe. But through a combination of circumstances, through being in a certain place – which must be here, this city, at a certain time, and in the company of certain people, you are on the point of vanishing.
He spoke so seriously that I did not laugh at the absurdity of it, as I was inclined to do. Instead, I felt impatient and my impatience grew to anger when I thought I’d have to pay a good few francs from my precious Fellowship to a crazy doctor who had dabbled in the occult and had perhaps read Freud’s notes on hysteria. He had told me, however, what I wanted to know, though I had some doubts, now, as to whether I should believe him. My eyes were perfect. I myself concluded that the pain was associated perhaps with migraine. Or something. I decided to endure it while it lasted, and try to forget it when it was mercifully absent. I had my work to do. At last I had in some way relieved my mind of certain fears.
I returned to the apartment. The pain eased. I found myself thinking again and again of psychological annihilation, of the mood of annihilation, of obliteration, which may overcome a person or a country, like weather. I thought, if a person’s psychological climate, which, I suppose, could be interpreted as his habitual method of dealing with his life, were of passive submission as mine in my short-sighted world had been, then a storm of unusual force, a combination of aggressive personalities, could wreck him, tear him to pieces like wolves descending from the mountains upon the timid sheep.
Well, I thought, all this is rather obvious, in theory. But does it happen in real life? Storms die, climates change, nothing is permanent.
I had been sitting at the oil-cloth covered table thinking this. I had been sitting with my chin propped up by my elbows. I’d drunk my coffee. I was waiting for the Fosters to arrive to take me to see their house. I remember now that suddenly I felt an almost convulsive fear pass between my shoulder blades. I held my breath. I traced my thoughts of the past few moments. Storms die, climates change, nothing is permanent. I had a horrifying vision of the Watercress family, and the Fosters, and the Lees, assembled in the Rose Hurndell Memorial Room, feeding on the death of Rose Hurndell, nourishing themselves with the power of permanence which death has and which they so much desire. It was like a pagan ceremony. As long as they were together in force around Rose Hurndell and her death, they constituted a power, a permanent storm, which could strike the so-called ‘innocent bystander’ who because of his circumstances must join the circle about the dead and because of his nature, the nothing-nature of a novelist who lives only through his characters, must be obliterated, erased. The idea was so fanciful, and the reaction from the fear so overwhelming that I burst into laughter, and just then the Fosters appeared at the glass door, tapping and smiling.
—You seem to be enjoying yourself, Harry, they said, when I’d let them in.
Elizabeth sniffed.
—What a dump.
—Let’s get back home, Dorset said. —And we’ll show you a place you can really live and work in!
They led me out to their estate wagon, of the new plastic type, tangerine in colour, and we drove away from the frontier towards the Centre-Ville and just beyond where, at the foot of a wide tree-lined avenue leading to a little mountain village, they turned right to a tiny oasis, suddenly full of palm trees, where, on the tree-covered hill, stood the big eighty-year-old villa where they lived, and which they had painted handsomely, and on the flat, near the entrance gate, the small villa with the dark-green shutters which they hoped I would want to live in.
I had not seen such a mass of green since I arrived in Menton. I felt again the sense of being blessed. The palms, stirred by a light wind, were full of movement, with golden globes at their base. I said to myself that Dr Alberto Rumor must be a madman to conclude that I, Harry Gill, the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow, was the cooperating victim of psychological assassins. I burst out laughing again.
—Come up to the big house, Elizabeth said, —and we’ll have a drink and you can tell us the joke. Dorset likes a good joke. He’s always on the lookout for one.
Her use of the third person to speak of her husband who was present seemed to me, in my new awareness of the prospect of invisibility, a subtle way of erasing him. I wondered were they happy together.
Almost as if to answer my question, Dorset said, falling in step with me as we went up the path, —You know, we’ve never been happier than we’ve been here. Have we?
Elizabeth turned to look at us. She was small and pale, quite unlike her sister Margaret Rose – I believe she inherited her build from her mother’s side. Her eyes screwed up in the light. They were powdery blue and her dress was blue. I was to find out that blue was her favourite colour and she invariably wore blue.
—No, she said. —We haven’t.
Dorset smiled, a slight astonishment in his brown eyes; he had been confirmed, and resurrected.
We went inside to the big golden-walled house, and sat drinking wine and talking. Mostly of Margaret Rose, her work, her life, her fame and her death.
6
Later the Fosters showed me the Big House and the small house. The Big House was of Oregon pine (they were told it had been imported eighty years ago from the United States and built by a United States family, keen royalists, who made sure they were in residence for the arrival on the Côte d’Azur of British and European royalty). It was built with towers and many staircases, like a building from some northern fairy tale, and in the short time they had been living on the Côte d’Azur the Fosters had themselves painted it, repaired plumbing, knocked out walls, put in windows, planted beds of flowers, masses of geraniums, daffodil bulbs. The sitting-room was spacious with the downstairs circular corner, corresponding to the upstairs tower, used as a dining room whose wide windows looked directly on to the Mediterranean, while the windows on the left looked out at the Alpes Maritime.
Dorset Foster, I learned, was English, and had come out to New Zealand as a young exchange school teacher when he was twenty-four, and in an Auckland suburb he met and married Elizabeth, also a teacher, three years later, when she was twenty. Margaret Rose had gone to England the year before. After their marriage, Dorset had a permanent job in a primary school on the North Shore where they made their home and where Felicity was born. Felicity was now twenty-three, married, with a small son.
Two years ago, when Dorset was fifty, he had decided to retire on a sum of money, left by his father in England, and go with Elizabeth to live at Menton, where Rose had lived, and to supplement his income by teaching English privately to French students. Elizabeth’s father had come to Menton with them – an arrangement which everyone said would not work for a seventy-year-old man, but, Dorset said, in the twelve months he had been there, until he died quite suddenly, he had become a real Frenchman, off to the football every Sunday, down to the park to play ‘boules’ (they had given him a handsome silver set that Christmas), into the cafés for his wine.
—All the same, Elizabeth said, —he missed New Zealand. I think it was a mistake.
For a while they argued over whether it had been a mistake: they could not decide.
—And now Elizabeth’s bringing out a volume of Rose’s letters, Dorset said. —And I’m teaching English three times a week to some poor woman who’s lost her husband and has taken up English to make her forget her grief.
—And you really like living here? I said. —You don’t miss New Zealand?
—Not a bit, they both said eagerly, quickly.
—And now we’ll show you the little house where we want you to live and work.
They took me outside, through a white gate, and down a short path to the little house.
—It’s spotless, Elizabeth said.
(I remembered the real estate advertisements in the newspaper: ‘Spotless. Immaculate. Kitchen a dream.’)
—See. Spotless.
Everything was brand-new – new refrigerator and stove in the kitchen, new hot water cylinder in the bathroom, new thermostatic electric heating, new paint and paper, floor stain, carpets, dishes, cooking utensils. And in the sitting-room, at the precise angle to catch the light from the windows overlooking Italy and mingle it with the light from the windows overlooking the palm-filled garden in front of the houses, there was a new huge desk with many drawers, such as a novelist dreams of, overhung by a bright desk lamp; and on the desk, a brand-new portable typewriter. I could scarcely believe the good fortune – I do not qualify the fortune with a personal pronoun because then I was not sure whose fortune it was: I only suspected it might be mine.
