In the Memorial Room

by Frame, Janet

  At night the motion and sound of the train entered my bedroom and my heart beat faster, hearing them, and waiting for them to pass with their sleeping passengers who did not know that I was listening to the trains and who had never heard my name and would not know if I met them on the station that I had listened to them travelling when they were fast asleep.

  So I spent my days, writing in my new apartment and sometimes going to the Memorial Room where someone had left a typewriter with Elite type (my new typewriter provided by the Fosters was Elite type suitable for manuscripts). To get to the Memorial Room I now had to walk along the promenade past the old town with its pale blue and green and pink shutters, and its mass solid with not a sight of trees or streets between, the only growth visible being the row of cypress trees forming the boundary of the cemetery on the hill. Looking up I could see the rows of tombstones. I said to myself that one day I would walk to the cemetery and inspect the graves and the gravestones.

  Each day I did almost the same thing. I woke. I opened the dark green shutters of my bedroom window. I washed and dressed. I went to the restaurant, which was always crowded with workers having petit déjeuner, for the newspaper, Nice-Matin. I walked home and read the newspaper, choosing what to read from the headlines. I read the local news and advertisements of Nice, Monaco, Menton and the small mountain villages and the seaside places between these larger towns. I read the births and the names of the newly born and their parents. I read the deaths and took note of the ages of those who had died. I read the page of foreign news, the page of traffic accidents, robberies, holdups, murders, the weather with the temperature in France and Europe and beyond, the television programmes although I did not have a television, and the radio programmes, taking note of the classical and modern music and what time it was to be played, although I never listened to it. I read the answers to queries about the rights of tenant and landlord and the problems of those with widow’s and old-age pensions. I read the list of blood-donors who had been awarded a medal or congratulations for releasing a certain amount of blood. Then in the classified advertisements I read the offers of employment for Gens de Maison; villas for sale; offers and demand for furnished accommodation; the legal notices; miscellaneous advertisements; animals; lost and found; and sometimes the marriage column. Then I’d read the back page which would have a late news story of a murder or robbery or the story, continued, of a disaster which had half-filled the front page.

  After reading the newspaper I sat down to write, looking out of the window from time to time at the palm trees and the mountains. I wrote all morning after which I made myself lunch, pottered around the small house keeping it in order as I had promised to do, sweeping the carpet with the carpet sweeper and so on. Or if the weather were fine I washed my shirt and socks and pegged them on the clothes line that was strung over the private terrace; and being up there and in the sun I’d stretch out in the green deckchair, which had the name of a hotel in Venice on the back, and I’d close my eyes and sleep a while or lie looking down over the olive grove to the water.

  Later in the day when people began to stir again after their meal, I’d go on the promenade and join the throngs of people walking up and down beside the sea. Then when four o’clock came I had the opportunity to call on the one or two English inhabitants of the city who had told me they ‘took tea’ at four o’clock and if I were walking that way I could join them. This was how I came to meet Haniel and Louise Markham, who had arrived from London about the same time as I arrived from New Zealand. Their apartment overlooked the Casino, and the avenue of oranges.

  I knew the ages of Haniel and Louise because someone had told me; I think it was Connie Watercress. Haniel who had known Rose Hurndell in his early twenties when he married was now thirty-nine. Louise was forty-seven. He was tall, slim with golden hair thinning to an ash grey. His face was delicately constructed and pale. His mouth was small and red-lipped. He was clean shaven. He moved with grace and his voice was soft. Louise had put on weight. (I had seen a photograph of her in her younger days.) She was stout, dressed in a brown costume with a cream-coloured blouse and a tie. Although her arms were not long in proportion to her body, her reach was long as her shoulders were wide and powerfully built and acted as an effective hinge when she leaned forward to grasp her teacup or the plate of cakes that she had made, round volcano-shaped pastries with a preserved cherry swimming in its lake of red syrup on each peak.

  Haniel and Louise introduced me to Harvey Pulsifer, who had arrived that afternoon from America for a skiing holiday in one of the local resorts. He and Haniel, whom he had known in London when he was there as an economics student, were leaving the next day for one of the mountain villages. Haniel said he did not ski himself but he was accompanying his friend.

  Before ten minutes of my visit had passed we began to speak of Rose Hurndell.

  —My wife was her constant companion, Haniel said.

  His eyes were small and pale blue. He concentrated them on his wife’s face. His head leaned forward a little.

  Louise laughed rather loudly.

  —Rose and I were great chums, she said. —I looked after her. We came down here in the late fifties. Haniel said, ‘Go with her to Menton, to the Villa Florita.’ And I did.

  —I was in London then, wasn’t I, with my parents. It was my last year at school. I met Haniel at the Victoria and Albert, Harvey said.

  —I was looking at the china. And I moved to the glass room.

  —I was in the glass room.

  Just then Louise clattered her teacup, and spilled a little of the tea, about two spoonsful, on the blue carpet.

  Harvey jumped to his feet and went to the small kitchen and returned with a cloth. He bent to the carpet and rubbed at it hard because it was an error. He erased it at last.

  He stood up.

  —Now, he said, —it does not show.

  We each inspected it to see if it showed. We agreed it did not.

  —So you are the new Watercress-Armstrong Fellow, Louise said, stretching out her wide foot and making a last rubbing movement upon the tea stain. —Are you going to write about Rose?

  As she spoke I saw the muscles in her throat tighten.

  —No, I hadn’t planned to.

  —Her sister Elizabeth is here. She and her husband have retired here. Elizabeth is editing her letters. You know?

  —Yes, I said. —I’m living in their small house.

  —Oh, you are! We had thought of asking you would you live here. There’s a complete apartment downstairs. Private. Quite complete. You would not have to know we were above you. I don’t have a very light tread but I take care. Haniel has a light tread. And we don’t play musical instruments. A record now and again in the evening. If you are changing your apartment again, then, there’s our apartment downstairs. Shall we show it to you?

  I said that I would not be moving immediately from where I was.

  —And you’re writing a novel. We’ve read about you. You write historical novels. Are you a bestseller?

  My book Wairau Days had been a bestseller in New Zealand.

  —One of my books sold quite well, I said.

  Just then Haniel finished his cup of tea and he and Harvey, with a smile and a pleased to have met you, left the room.

  —These men! Louise sighed as she watched them go.

  I had not seen such a used face since I looked on the old maid of all work at the hotel where I stayed.

  —I’m a busy woman, Louise said. —I miss Rose of course. And Haniel’s only a boy, really. He was on the stage in London.

  —Really?

  —Yes.

  —Did Rose Hurndell have false teeth? I asked suddenly.

  Louise replied calmly.

  —She had the top ones out when she first came to London. He was a good dentist. But things have changed.

  —Yes, things have changed. I’m English too. At least I was born there.

  —Were you? What part?

  —Sussex.
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br />   —Oh.

  —I must go now, I said, standing.

  —Your time is your own, Louise said. Her lips made a tasting motion and she made a sour face.

  —It isn’t, you know, I said. —You have spoken the first lie in approximately three thousand words. My time is my own! Should I be grateful to you for the lie?

  She looked confused; she did not understand me.

  —I have a big powerful car, she said. —I will drive you home.

  —No, I said. —I will walk.

  I walked back.

  10

  A week later I made my visit to George and Liz Lee, in their home on the road to the mountain village of Sainte-Agnès. They too had invited me for tea. I caught the three o’clock bus from the Gare Routière not far from the railway station and sat myself in a back seat where I would not be disturbed by passengers joining and leaving the bus en route. The weather had been fine for seven days although a storm and lowered temperatures were predicted for the next morning. I could see the clouds massing over the mountains.

  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.

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sp; —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.