In the Memorial Room (11 page)

That month of March was vigil weather. The expressions on the faces of the people reminded me of the expressions imagined on the faces of those on land waiting for news of those at sea; people scanned the sky, the sea, the mountains, and the faces of others, to try to read the news or to find when it would at last be given. The Festival was over. The strangers had gone. The town, although not empty, had an air of desolation. The thousands of fires of the oranges and lemons – so proudly lit and displayed in the garden square, as suns attended and grown in the earth, by those who might have imagined they had no need of sky-sun – were extinguished. On display for at least six weeks, battered by the storms, the fruit-fires that survived as fruit only were sold in an atmosphere so much in contrast to their late glory that one felt a sense of humiliation such as one feels outside the Casino at Monte Carlo, seeing the furtive notices in the upper-storey windows of some buildings –
Money advanced for Jewels
. There was a feeling that not only the fruit but the sky-sun itself had been robbed of its dignity, forced to sell itself out to keep up appearances. Does one become anthropomorphic over oranges and lemons? This time of oppressive stillness, of tiredness, of waiting, was made more a time of cruelty by the dispersal for money of the once proudly constructed sun.

People were saying, too, that the oranges and lemons in the festival were always especially bitter, and it was not civic pride which kept the exhibits intact throughout the festival, it was a simple human dislike of bitter-tasting fruit.

The town was waiting. I did not realise that I too was taking part in the waiting until coming home to my villa, my sanctuary, one afternoon I found a workman’s truck outside the front door, the front door wide open, and sounds of workmen hammering, tramping about, coming from inside.

Elizabeth Foster and Dorset Foster came to the door.

—Oh, Harry. We hope you don’t mind. Is the place comfortable for you?

—Of course, I said. —I have everything.

They smiled with delight.

—We want you to have more. More of everything. We’re putting in another heater. Just think of that. And hot water both upstairs and downstairs. And we’re making a bath downstairs as well as upstairs. We’ll install a new electric meter, to take the load. And you need a larger stove, instead of that cooking plate. We’d always wanted to make a few alterations but there seemed to be little purpose in doing them just for ourselves – we needed someone like you to get us going. You understand?

—Yes, I said, I understood.

—Now, you’ll be here six months, Elizabeth said. —In six months we can have everything fixed up, including a new roof. We need a new roof.

—It will take six months, then? I asked, trying to grasp the idea that the sanctuary for which I had already paid six months’ rent in advance was to be disturbed.

—Oh yes, six months at least, for the alterations. Don’t you think so, Dorset?

Dorset stared at me a moment, and I swear he had the look of a tailor who is trying to judge approximately your size before he begins to measure and cut – the cloth only, it is to be hoped, not the person who will wear the suit.

—Six months, yes, he said.

I felt, although he was sympathetic to me, he and Elizabeth were driven in this by a joint power against which I’d have no defence.

—What about my writing? I said boldly.

As I said at the beginning of my story I’ve never been a person who speaks up, and others have condemned me for it, for my easy-going nature, my tolerance amounting to weakness and described by others and myself in moods of exasperation as
spinelessness
, a description which man only and not an invertebrate looks on as an insult.

—Oh, we’ll move you from room to room. We promise we won’t disturb you. We’ll be as quiet as mice and we’ll tell the workmen that you’re writing and want absolute
silence
, and there’s plenty of room in the house for you to find a little corner of your own; that tiny desk we made for you will fit in anywhere, you’ll be surprised.

I wanted to shout suddenly, —But I’m going blind!

Instead I asked Elizabeth if she’d ever thought of doing writing, like her sister Rose.

—Not anymore, she said. —I’m here – we’re here – more or less to guard Rose’s interests, not in a material way, in a memorial way, to straighten out rumours and so on. Our interest now is the two houses, to
create
something from them. I suppose if one were not being modest one would talk of it as making a work of art.

—Just as important in its way as Rose Hurndell’s poems, I said, ingratiatingly, meaning at first to make an ironical remark but finding it came out without irony, almost with deference.

—You see, Dorset. Just what I told you, Elizabeth said. —Rose just happens to have written poems while I have chosen my own medium. Rose, for instance, could not have painted that sitting-room wall.

There was a pointlessness about the conversation which enticed me to continue it.

—You mean the white wall in the sitting-room?

—The white wall in the sitting-room.

I almost shouted suddenly, —But I’m going blind!

The workmen appeared at the door. They wanted instructions about where to put the new electric stove.

Excusing myself, I went out of the house and down the avenue to the beachfront and the promenade. It was too early for bathers but there were many people sitting on the seats watching the waves and the black-headed gulls riding again and again the large waves, and the
camions
tipping their loads of soil to make the reclamation for the new restaurant in time for the summer opening. The soil surged from the truck, some falling into the water, colouring the waves, the colour spreading along the waterfront so that the inner waves were clay-coloured, the outer waves the azure so proudly talked of and written of.

I sat on one of the seats. I felt homeless. The Fellowship tasted, not bitter, but sour in my mind. The springtime sky was blue, the distant mountains white with rock and sun. The waiting was over. I remembered a song we used to sing at school:

The glow of evening tints the bay
where cloudlets kiss the sea.
A tiny boat so far away
is sailing home to me,
is sailing home to me.

O haste thee home the sailor cries
I’m waiting on the shore,
Haste oh haste my heart it cries
the waiting days are o’er,
the waiting days are O’ER.

The final line was sung in three parts: by those boys whose voice had changed, the girls and the boy sopranos, while at the end of the song the teacher, a woman, let out a long plaintive note, to the words
the waiting days are o’er
while we echoed her note, after which she (conducting the while) suddenly snapped her hand across her face as if to break the spell, signalled to the boy who was playing the piano (he would go far, they said, and eventually he went as far as the corner where he bought a garage, as he was an excellent mechanic) who also stopped abruptly.

Then in a talking voice which sounded strange unaccompanied, —Take out your silent reading books.

So I remember this. And why not, in the land of Proust:
Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure
.

And so, also, day after day, the alterations continued. Unable to work in the Memorial Room or the small villa, I spent my time roaming between the two, and hoping before I reached one, then the other, that I would find the retreat and silence I told myself I needed in order to think and write.

One day, a new stove, with a see-through oven, warming drawer, thermostatic control, light control and so on, was installed. Then I’d walk to the Memorial Room and sit in the tangled garden listening to the chuckling birds who knew about everything. Then I’d return to the villa to find workmen drilling holes in the wall to put in power points.

—Oh, we must have new power points. We haven’t enough power, they cried, who were effectively controlling my every move.

Another day – new cutlery, new plates, a new set of cups. A hot water cylinder, a new bath, a new reading lamp.

—You will want for nothing, they said.

I still had not told them of my prospective blindness; perhaps I did not myself believe it, for I had had a kind of obsession about blindness for many years, and even in my first two historical novels I took care to have at least one character (not fictional) who was blind; I tended, at times, to look on my preoccupation with blindness as an artistic device, like the blind man in a Greek play, or the old man or the fool in Shakespeare: the frenzied blind man who waves his stick and shouts, because he senses it, the danger that lies ahead. Even my parents – and my father a doctor, too – looked on my recent problems with my eyes as something that would ‘pass’. No one in our family has been blind. They tend to deafness. Again, I was following a convention in not concerning myself with deafness, for even though a hearing aid may be visible, deafness has an infuriating secrecy about it, and it is harder to identify with the deaf; it is easier to make them the subject of humour, to make their comic mishearing of speech into a satire on human communication; and, as those who are disabled tend to do, they use the power which they find in their disability to surround themselves with an antidote to endearment. A hearing aid arouses less sympathy than a white walking-stick. In a way, by turning to blindness, or being directed towards it, I was following a similar path to those around me whom I was beginning to condemn both for their romantic notions of writers living and dead and for their uncontrollable desires to seek shelter and permanence in the dead and the work of the dead. Being in France, I was reminded of the scene from Victor Hugo’s ‘The Retreat from Moscow’ where those who were victorious simply by their being alive could remain alive only if they sought shelter from the blizzard by creeping within the bloated hollows of the dead horses.

A fancy, certainly, to talk of Rose Hurndell as a horse, but I had seen her described as one, and written of as one, by a poet who had known her. ‘And there was a horse in the King’s stables: and the name of the horse was, GENIUS’, was his prefaced quote from
The Arabian Nights
.

There came a time when the alterations were being made everywhere except in the small solarium-corridor between the bathroom and the top of the stairs. I could close the door to the stairs, the door to the bathroom and the door to the kitchen and still have enough light from the glass skylight which was the only roof above me. I moved my desk there, fitting it against two of the three wall-cupboards, which I used as a linen cupboard and spare wardrobe. Oh no, I did not make this arrangement openly. If I had, my kind hosts would immediately have decided upon an alteration for the only space which they had neglected to plan for. There I worked secretly, moving my desk back and forth, and enjoying their triumphant expression each day when they saw how my desk and my papers were surrounded by the instruments of alteration. I say ‘triumphant’. Had I talked to them of my interpretation of their expression they would have been alarmed and horrified, and exclaimed, —We’re doing this all for
you
, to make
you
comfortable so you can
write
.

They’d smile and frown, —Oh Harry, you must think we’re awful, but this is to make you comfortable.

Perhaps I was indulged as a child. I remember that on particularly cold cheerless days my mother would say to me, ‘You don’t want to go to school today, do you, Harry?’ And I’d be tempted not to go, my mother’s painting a picture of such miserable weather inducing me to shiver at the prospect of the wet and the cold and to think favourably of my mother’s kindly qualities. It was only later when I was growing up that I realised it was my mother’s need, her loneliness, which led her to try to keep me home on a wet cold day. She felt that by going to school I was abandoning her. I have observed this attitude towards people who write or paint or compose or in any way desert the living and the visible world to create a world of their own that is a threat to the existence and survival of the generally known world. I have known people to use all kinds of delaying tactics (and the writers, composers and painters and such like themselves use these for are not they as afraid of the threat of the destruction and recreation of the known world?), —Don’t write today. Come and visit us. Let’s talk. Let’s drink. Let’s make love. You don’t really want to work today, do you? Don’t desert us, don’t threaten us, stay here with us, safe in the known world, looking at the sky and the sunlight, relaxing, after all
you’re a long time dead
.