In the Memorial Room Page 2

  I read:

  The Ministerial prime

  a political summertime

  berg, baron, bedtime

  elective ice, infertile wives,

  an unfurnished room of nose-gays and lilies of the valley.

  Not one of her good poems, I thought. All general, no particular. I read on:

  The general has slain

  has overcome the particular domain

  a man is men one is fifty fifty is one

  only there is no sun to be under

  time out of particular thunder

  the mind emerges kept honeyful and warm

  by a swarm.

  I don’t care for such poems. It occurred to me that in another few years they’d be forgotten, that although Rose Hurndell had become well known and much read, one had only to look in the endpapers of old books to find the extravagant praises of forgotten authors. I fancied that seven or eight years is too brief a time after death for the kind of memorial which the Watercresses and the Armstrongs had founded, for their memorial gesture might find itself also engulfed in the gradual oblivion necessary before the re-emergence of those whose qualities of work survive decay. I suspected therefore that the founding of the scholarship was a means by which the Watercresses and the Armstrongs, denied fame in their journalistic endeavours, might snatch a little of its nourishing glory (as I had snatched the savouries after the ceremony, for I had been hungry, and all the rich invited guests had gone), sheltered and strengthened by the growth, blossoming and presence of Rose Hurndell as the small plants in the bush are sheltered and given life by the starry-blooming manuka. The title of Rose Hurndell’s second book, Manuka Night, seemed appropriate in that setting.

  I know, as I have said, that my own motives for applying for and accepting the scholarship are far from ‘pure’. I am aware of the drama of ‘the young man going blind’. When one is faced with such disasters in one’s life one has to use the drama of the situation as a vehicle to go through it or bypass it. The name Menton has no particular appeal to me. I am curious of course about Rose Hurndell and her life and work. I shall be interested to meet her brother-in-law Dorset Foster and her sister Elizabeth who have travelled to set up their retirement home so far from their own country and who must have been lured by the fact that Elizabeth’s sister lived and died there. No doubt I shall meet also the Louise Markham who left her husband Haniel and went to Menton to the Villa Florita to live with Rose Hurndell until her death. I have been told that both Haniel and Louise Markham have a permanent winter apartment in Menton. And the Watercresses who know Menton have told me, ‘to put me in the picture’ as they expressed it, of Liz and George Lee, the English couple who help to run the English library, of their own son Michael who, they say, is a promising writer. They have hinted that perhaps, who knows, when I arrive in Menton they will be waiting to welcome me and ‘show me the ropes’, a nautical term no doubt appropriate to use to one who sails in a few weeks to spend thirty-two days on board a ship of the Paradise Line.

  My preliminary journal ends here. During my stay in Menton I shall make notes in between writing a novel, and when I return from Menton with (I hope) my novel completed, I shall write the story of my tenure of the Fellowship. Tenure is a word which appeals to me.

  The Tenure

  1

  As one known purely as an historical novelist (the ‘known’ being an exaggeration as I believe a writer is not ‘known’ until his grocer and barber have read his works without astonishment) about to yield to the temptations of English fiction or, in the case of recording my experiences of the tenure of the Fellowship, English fact, I have an enticing range of possibilities beginning with Beowulf, The Wanderer and The Seafarer and continuing, as you are aware, through Euphues, Thomas More, Milton, and so on to Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming. Do you sense a slight lowering of standards towards the end? Is it the end?

  How shall my story be expressed? How shall I bring myself alive to your ears and eyes, all your senses? I have already described my face; you will have found nothing particular in it; you may have concluded that I am a mere particular in it; you may have concluded that I am a mere generality. The names of my two books, however, are definite, existing beyond me; you will certainly not have read them but you will have ‘heard of’ them or ‘read of’ them which is about all a young writer like myself can hope for and not be downcast by, unless, even when he is no longer young, the pseudo-reading of his work continues.

  I have told you my age, and, vaguely, the course of my studies. I have mentioned my family, my origins. Unless you are to imagine that I am homosexual and unless I wish to encourage you in this belief because it is true, I must account for my personal relations between puberty and the present, and you may even wish me to explain to you why I have not yet married, for marriage today is an affair between schoolboys and schoolgirls and I, who have lingered, find myself questioned in a conforming society.

  I haven’t yet found anyone to love. There are people like me, you know, who are not given a large dose of libido and who conserve what they have for their own purpose of staying alive. The prospect of my blindness has, I’ll admit, the effect of driving me at times into a state of panic and in such a state I may be likely to fall in love very quickly, at first sight, as one swallows a strong drink. I don’t know. I would describe this present age as an age of Explanation when the overriding fear is that nothing should remain unexplained, and this, combined with the age of excess of literacy brings every man and woman to a state of watchfulness (Why did I do this? Why did I do that? Let me explain…) that is exceeded only by the watchfulness of nations and their elected or self-appointed guardians. The world has adopted the Boy Scout motto, ‘Be Prepared’, while remaining at the Boy Scout level of maturity.

  My story, however, is of my tenure of the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship. Like any young man setting out on a voyage I was filled with excitement and anticipation and (because of the problem with my eyesight which I did not speak of) there was at times an alarming fear that I was about to be struck ‘the mortal blow’. Had I been ten or twenty years older I would not have dreamed of making this voyage, chiefly because by the time one reaches the forties and fifties the insulation against even the prospect of danger and disaster is wearing thin and the physical menaces of a walk from home to supermarket are now visible in detail and demand careful strategy, as if the likely victim were travelling thousands of miles to the other side of the world. I shan’t describe my voyage on that famous ship of the Paradise Line that was overpopulated with anxiety-ridden immigrants returning with their families from the Pacific lands to their former dreamed-of homes in Holland, France, Germany, Great Britain with the intensity of the dream increasing the level of anxiety and the supposed ‘permanence’ of the move in a life where few things are permanent weighing so heavily on their minds and bodies that each morning the waiting room of the young bulbous-nosed arrogant doctor, who was scarcely more than a medical student, was filled to overflowing with sniffling, crying, groaning passenger-patients, while from the deckchairs ranged along the promenade deck came, from the would-be lotus eaters trapped thirty-two days in the ship of the Paradise Line:

  a doleful song

  Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong.

  The analogy with the lotus eaters was completed by the continuous playing of deck music,

  There is sweet music here that softer falls.

  No, I shan’t describe that voyage, or my time spent day after day leaning over the deck-rail trying to get a voice or signal from the small transistor radio I bought, greedily, at duty-free prices; or lying in the tiny cream-painted cabin, trying to read in the dimmest light although all the cabin lights were switched on, almost driving myself to destroy my sight with word-trash instead of word-treasure, weighing the moral acceptability of each form of destruction, and finding in the mutinous lunacy that seizes all passengers during that eleven-day journey, without land, across the Pacific, when one does n
ot need to have killed an albatross to suffer the nightmare, that destruction by trash is more to be approved; and so I’ll not describe my voyage which was filled with counterfeit words and phrases, eyes that followed around rooms, that dropped, glistened, drooped, glances that travelled and were exchanged and burned, hot looks that set the heart on fire, smouldering looks, hearts in ashes, ice-cold hearts and melting hearts. I wrote nothing. I read trash. I read one writer, however, who paid with his thought, paid exactly, for the use of his language. And yet of that I remember only the various uses that human beings may be put to – there was a man, the writer said, who lived in Edinburgh at the turn of last century and who rented his humped back in the streets as a desk for clerks to write their accounts upon.

  My story, however, is of the Tenure. I disembarked from my ship of the Paradise Line (you will note my possessive pronoun after thirty-two days of sailing within her), and I travelled by train, not by Le Train Bleu, for I must tell you, as it is important in my story, that I am the kind of person who is inclined to miss the best trains, to find the worst rooms in hotels, the surliest waiters in restaurants; nor am I the kind of person to protest, for the life-long disability with my eyesight has accustomed me to the belief that others see the ‘real’ world but I do not – how can I when my eyesight is defective; I have to take the words of others and of the world on trust and be labelled variously with the same implication, a fool, a doormat, someone who is forever being imposed upon. I am the classic ‘shy mild little man’ who may resort to physical violence if he is desperate, or, if he is literary, to linguistic violence – well, there are many ways of facing the aggressor, if one can identify the aggressor. Someone once told me, however, that I am the uttermost fool, away at the end of the line, because I sometimes do not recognise that I am being imposed upon.

  I travelled next to a seat I had reserved but it was already taken, therefore I did not argue. I sat up all night in an airless carriage, and I tried from time to time to perceive France, for this was my first visit anywhere ‘overseas’, but I saw reflected in the window only my own dust-distorted face and those of my five companions. I took out my French phrase book which I’d bought the week before my ship sailed (I studied French intermittently at school) and read most of the night, listening also to the conversation of my fellow passengers. From time to time I had a sensation of the greyness of the world which I supposed to be related to my eye condition, as if the rods or cones of my sight were being destroyed and I were to be left with the vision which they say cats have, of eternal greyness. Just before the train drew into Menton, in the early morning, I had been dozing, and I remember I wakened, and the green of the palms, the palms themselves, which made me think momentarily that I had travelled to the heart of a desert, they were so unlike trees I had seen anywhere before, seemed in their greenness to bathe my eyes with blessing – all the foliage of all the trees seemed to shine, as dew or rain had fallen.

  I had wondered, before, whether in the process of losing my sight I would begin greedily to observe colour – or would it be shape and form – or the placing of the world, the composition of a room, a street, a view of mountains and the sea – would I begin to hoard the world, I wondered, as people hoard their possessions for the simple reason that they are dying and can take nothing with them? I did not even know the answer at the moment the train drew into Menton city. I felt, just then, a kind of indebtedness to green, as a colour. Do we possess most what we are indebted to? Could I have said, as a painter, or poet:

  Les Anges, sont-ils devenus discrets!

  Le mien à peine m’interroge.

  Que je lui rende au moins le reflet

  d’un email de Limoges.

  Et que mes rouges, mes verts, mes bleus,

  son oeil rond réjouissent.

  S’il les trouve terrestres, tant mieux

  pour un ciel en prémisses.

  In that case one becomes what one is indebted to.

  But my story is of the Tenure…

  2

  If you had expected me to tell you that Margaret Rose Hurndell, thirteen years dead, was on the station platform to meet me, you may be as disappointed as I would have been startled had it been so. I was, however, startled to find Connie and Max Watercress, whom I had last seen at the reception in Wellington, and a handsome richly bearded young man, the perfect stereotype of ‘the young writer’, whom they introduced as their son Michael, and his wife Grace, a tall large-boned fair-haired American with a sallow scar-pitted face and prominent teeth.

  Naturally, they hurried to explain their presence. I realised that I was not mistaken in assessing the assessment of me by others – there had been some idea that I might not be able to cope (with my eyesight) with arrival in a foreign land, and so Connie and Max from New Zealand had arranged with Michael and Grace from England to be in Menton and welcome me in force, as it were.

  —So here we are, Connie said, in rather self-conscious French.

  —Welcome to Menton.

  The four, chorusing the welcome, were joined by two other voices, one belonging to a smartly dressed eager-eyed and -faced woman in her fifties who gave her name as Liz Lee, Head of the Welcoming Committee, the other of her husband, George Lee, an Englishman in his middle sixties with an astonishingly unintelligible English voice which made him appear to be saying, through scarcely moving lips, then and whenever I spoke to him afterwards, one sentence only, Angela will be livid, from which one had to extract meaning and devise an intelligible appropriate answer, so that my conversation with him always went thus:

  He: Angela will be livid.

  I: Yes, I was there last week.

  Or thus:

  He: Angela will be livid. Angela will be livid.

  Angela will be livid.

  I: I found it quite pleasant in its way, considering.

  From time to time I had a dreadful thought that he might have suffered a stroke which made it difficult for him to move his lips in speech. My search to excuse will lead me always to the infirmities of mind and body; still, I’m not so much a saint that I did not enjoy the absurdity of our conversation and perhaps sense a hint of the power it gave him, of one who ‘spoke with tongues’, concealed amid the dreadful exposures of clear enunciation which were enacted around him.

  After the welcoming ceremony at the station and the remarks that I must be tired, the six claimed my two suitcases for me, and saw me to a taxi, directing it to the Villa Paradiso where I had booked, by letter from New Zealand, for five days, choosing the Villa Paradiso out of the four suggested to me by Connie Watercress (Villas Maria, Rosa, Louise, Paradiso) with the wild extravagance of adventure which suggested that as I was travelling by a ship of the Paradise Line it might be just as well for me, on my arrival at Menton, to extend my stay in Paradise.

  During my first three days at the Villa Paradiso I found a small one-room apartment which I could pay for with the rather meagre Fellowship and owing to the understanding of the patron of the Villa Paradiso I was allowed to leave after three days. So. There I was, three days in Menton, with a tiny sordid apartment to stay in, not far from the famous Margaret Rose Hurndell Memorial Room, which I had not yet seen, the key being held by one of the French officials of the town, and recovered enough from my journeys of the past five weeks to be ready for the official welcoming reception and dinner. These were held on my fifth day, in an order of creation, so to speak, and the reception, I’m told, though my memory was blurred by sea-travel and champagne, went very well, being held along with a reception for a retiring commander of the Navy, a native of Menton, so that most of the evening was devoted to naval speeches and conversations (with most of the guests sailors – in a way continuing the Paradise journey) while the speech to welcome me was delivered during one of the lulls which periodically occur in a cocktail party. Suddenly, I found the mayor advancing towards me, my name spoken aloud, photographers appearing and surrounding me, and Connie and Max and Michael Watercress and his wife Grace, and there was the gr
acious mayor extending his hand to – Michael Watercress. Of course. The stereotype author. I blushed miserably like a schoolboy. Apologetically the mayor turned to me and shook hands but the photographers had already taken their photos. An account of the ceremony appeared in Nice-Matin three days later, with a photograph captioned, The Mayor shakes hands with this year’s Watercress-Armstrong Fellow. The photograph showed the gracious mayor extending his hand to Michael Watercress.

  Standing near Michael Watercress, the perfectly presentable stereotype of the modern author, you could see if you looked closely, though half the body was out of the photo, a rather stocky young man with glasses and curly hair and a look of what might be frenzied embarrassment on his face. He was holding his hand in a mimicry of the bearded young writer’s pose.

  I must tell you that I was equally successful, or unsuccessful, at the dinner that evening, given at the famous seaside restaurant, where Michael Watercress – and why not? – mistaken for the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow, was given three free bottles of champagne to take home. His protest was feeble; his delight was evident. I thought as I looked at him, We’re the same age. Which is substance, which is shadow, and where, who, is the sun? I decided I would get to know him, his wife, and the Watercress family.

  3

  My apartment was a small room accommodating a double bed, an oil-cloth covered small table, an armchair and two wooden chairs and a large wardrobe with a drawer and a door-mirror. A sheet of softboard divided this room from the cooking coin which consisted of two cupboards, a small gas stove such as is used in caravans and camping, a sink with cold water. Just inside the door of the room, through a wooden door, was the lavatory with rusted cistern and broken downpipe sealed with Sellotape and string, a small washbasin with two taps, one labelled COLD, out of which cold water flowed, the other HOT out of which nothing flowed. Beneath the basin, set on a frame, was a small bidet. The room was one of four ‘companion’ rooms, each opening on to a long balcony and screened from one another by pot plants, ferns and geraniums. The balcony overlooked the huge tiled roof of a garage from which it received, through ventilation holes in the tiled roof, waves of fumes of petrol and oil and these, combining with the trapped fumes from the slightly leaking gas stoves within the rooms, left a permanent sickening vapour upon the pretty geraniumed balconies.