The Memory Palace

‘I want to come in,’ he said, and did so. ‘Next, I want –’ He kissed her.

‘I don’t suppose they’ll miss me for a while,’ she said. ‘Mary’s showing them the video.’

‘Not blue movies in the suburbs!’

‘Really, Guy. It’s a record of their stay. They leave tomorrow.’

Sandy’s waspish mood began to fail her. Guy was stroking as much of her as he could reach, in the narrow hall.

They went up to the bedroom. The worn teddy which Sandy kept on her pillow annoyed him: a dumb and idiotic rival – which had been in bed with her many more times than he. He shoved it and it fell on the floor.

‘You brute,’ said Sandy. ‘Aah, mmm.’ Afterwards, he told her he was on his way to Dover, to the ferry. ‘“Prelude”,’ she said, ‘That’s what I like – as if you didn’t know.’ She got up and he slept. In the morning, she was there again beside him, ready to hit the button of the alarm before it shrilled.

‘Six fifteen, my God,’ she said, yawning. ‘I didn’t get rid of them until two. You’ve had a fine sleep, anyway.’

‘I needed it. I’ve been working hard. Ow!’

He massaged his hands.

‘What is it?’

‘They ache. It’s worst when I wake.’

‘Poor chap! Have you been using your PC a lot?’

‘I don’t write in longhand!’

‘That’s what it is, then. RSI, Repetitive Strain Injury – like a sports injury. You’ve over-strained the tendons. The holiday will help – unless you start using the laptop.’

‘I didn’t bring it, just paper and pens. I might do some real writing, in my own hand.’

‘Instead of Times?’

‘New York actually. In the early days I did write everything in longhand. Then I typed it. It was the only way I could make sense of myself.’

‘Unbelievable,’ she said. She was a lot younger than he and knew him only as a best-selling phenomenon, comfortably placed, and comfortably off – once, he had driven her through Maidford Halse, the Hantonshire village he had lived in for nearly thirty years, and she had glimpsed his house, bulky and solid with accrued respectability, across shady lawns.

‘I won the Christminster Prize for my first novel, Jack’s Tank – the story of a National Service recruit. It’s out of print now –’

‘I didn’t know – never guessed. What happened? What turned you into a Fantasisr?’

‘Sex,’ he said, and she laughed, but with some puzzlement. ‘A mortgage and a growing family – as you’ll find out yourself one day, when I’m history – or experience.’

Telling this white lie was easier than attempting the convoluted tale of his past misdemeanours and haunting loves.

‘Couldn’t you have gone on with the serious stuff as well as the Mythologies?’

‘Authors of Eng Lit are supremely selfish,’ he told her. ‘Successful pulp novelists can afford to be generous to their families, and their mistresses into the bargain. Look at you: what paid for your abortion and the weekend at Le Manoir afterwards?’

‘Koschei’s Envy, I suppose. That was the last, wasn’t it?’

‘I finished The Making of Koschei before I drove here last night.’

Sandy looked into his face.

‘Does it matter what tale you tell,’ she said, ‘as long as you have the power to overwhelm your reader’s senses and hold him in your grip – for as long as the story lasts?’

‘In theory, no; in terms of monetary reward, yes. Tell me, Sandy, do you give your students in-bed tutorials? Must I write a dissertation before I get my oats?’

He embraced and fucked her vigorously, quite certain that he demonstrated much more ardour and skill than a younger man; lay relaxed and satisfied across her and played with wisps of her titian hair (the colour was natural, unlike his wife’s).

‘You should get some Chinese balls,’ she said, dreamily.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Her comment startled him. He was not sure if she was joking, or criticizing his performance in some obscure female way.

‘Chain of thought,’ said Sandy. ‘Like these, look.’ She leaned from the bed and took from the bookshelf a small, cloth-covered box which she opened to disclose two silver balls resting on red velvet. ‘They keep your fingers supple, a kind of physiotherapy. Like this: roll them about on the flats of your hands. Might help your aches. Avis Dane swears by them. She’s a pianist and she uses hers every day to exercise her hands.’

The balls rang softly as they travelled round her outstretched palms.

‘Bells too!’ said Guy. ‘Very dubious, one of these pseudo-scientific cures. I bet it has its origins in magic – or is an urban myth, like the Child Who Was Kidnapped At Disneyland, or the Phantom Hitch-hiker.’

He tried to imitate her, bending and tilting his hands so that the balls rotated. It was hopeless. One after the other they slid off and landed with dull chimes on the bed.

‘There’s a lot of alternative medicine about – it works, too,’ said Sandy doggedly. ‘I take evening primrose oil for PMT. I suppose it’s a New Age thing – but real enough, not gypsy stuff.’

‘I used to know a gypsy well,’ he said, half to himself.

‘Mm?’

Unwise to tell; and again, too complicated. Besides, he was sleepy.

‘Oh, nothing, thinking ahead,’ he said, pulling Sandy down beside him. She was warm; she was short and tucked neatly inside his embrace, like his wife – but was without Jilly’s middle-aged creases and sags, smooth, taut-limbed. Poor Jilly, away in the States being mauled by art-lovers. Her carvings were more exciting than she, these days – shouldn’t have had another child, so late. Could he remember Helen’s body? She had been – what? Years ago. Perfection, exact of proportion, well-endowed by Dame Nature or by one of those dead mother-goddesses she’d revered. He was on his way to see her. Possibly. And Dominic, their son. He slept and dreamed of a boy and a man, who both looked like himself; they fished in a bran tub and caught Christmas tree baubles and silver bells. Then he had to run: something huge and clanking rushed past him – he had to catch a train! He had to catch up with someone! ‘Helen! Wait for meeee!’ he cried, but his mouth was sewn shut with black thread. He jumped awake.

‘– time?’ he asked.

‘Seven.’

‘I’ll never catch that ferry now.’

‘Yes you will. You still have four hours.’

Sandy, in her dressing gown, made breakfast for them. It was her kind of breakfast with yoghurt, muesli and freshly squeezed juice; usually, he delighted in the differences between her way of life and his own. Today, they irritated him. That Garfield poster above the fridge. Why on earth? – she was a bright girl. They had said goodbye lightly, and left a great deal unsaid.

Coming to, he saw his fellow passengers about him, heard their incessant chatter and the magnified voices booming from the television overhead. He sat upright to massage his hands, imagining the strained tendons chafing in their narrow sockets. RSI. What a bugger, what a hollow laugh: he had a fashionable complaint. Last night he had needed sex; now he needed a drink.

Guy Kester Parados, author (BA Christminster, Caster Cathedral School and Fawley College, born Alfrick-on-Severn 1941, married Jillian Meddowes, sculptor, 1962, six legitimate children and four illegitimate excluding two abortions and one miscarriage), went to the Camargue Lounge. Under his left arm he carried a copy of the Independent and two books, A Year in Provence and the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu. He wore jeans and an Armani tee-shirt. A linen jacket was slung across his shoulder. He was about six feet tall, with thick grey hair, grey or blue eyes, and was clean-shaven. He might have been any age between forty and fifty, although he was two months short of his forty-ninth birthday. He had no peculiar distinguishing marks and kept himself fit by playing cricket and by taking long country walks; had, in any case, no hereditary tendency to fat.

He experienced some difficulty with the number of objects he carried and resolved his problem by stacking the books and paper on the bar while he removed his RayBan sunglasses. He ordered a pint of Theakston’s Ale. When it was served, he took it to a table by a window and nursed his glass. After putting on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, which gave him a bookish air and made him look suddenly older, he opened the paper and read steadily, scanning the headlines first before turning back to peruse the articles in detail. Occasionally, he took a drink from his glass. He looked up once to stare at a blonde girl who sat at a nearby table, shook his head and read on; again looked up, at the mural on the opposite wall of ibis making piebald patterns against a landscape of fluid sky and marshland.

‘I began building the year the Sacred Ibis left the marsh. The foundations were soon dug and the footings laid. It was, after all, a small building. Many years passed before my spiritual troubles began, coinciding with the first extensions.

‘A new building for a new decade (my third). I was full of hope and my plans for the future excited me almost as much as the architectural drawings themselves; and far more than the white hands which, joined in prayer and resting on the sill of the confessional, were all I could see of Nemione Sophronia Baldwin, the youngest daughter of the reeve.

‘I had almost resolved to leave the Order. Strict observance of the Rule was very hard for a young man of twenty who could control neither himself nor his dreams, which were of an explicitly sexual nature. Yet Nemione’s self-sacrificing patience was an object lesson to me. Though I was tempted to abjure my vows and join myself to a battalion of the Brotherhood of the Green Wolf, I resolved to remain at Espmoss for two more years of study and then take what came. My courage was not of a high order. My disordered infancy followed by a childhood spent learning the Rule had made fear a close companion. I had often been whipped, at school by the proctor, Baptist Olburn, and in the cloister by Brother Fox, the Disciplinarian. The contemplation of freedom seemed sin enough.

‘We were free in all other respects. That I was allowed to begin this building (now such a remarkable edifice, as you see!) demonstrates how liberal was the Rule toward ambition. I had successfully completed my years as altar boy and novice: my building and the beautiful drawings of it were a kind of reward. The lodge (it was too small in those days to be called a palace) would contain both past and present, that much was obvious but, before I laid one stone, I had a tantalizing decision to make: should I now commence to erect the walls – they were to be of the finest white marble – or should I forsake the dark footings while I designed and planted the gardens?

‘The reeve’s daughter wore a gold chain about her slender neck. A small gold cross hung from it, one of the symbols of our faith. The four arms of the cross represent the points of the compass, north, south, east and west, and thus, our world, both material and spiritual. The device also represents the many cross-roads which we will find ourselves paused at, during life, while we ponder a vital decision: which direction to take now?

‘I had come to such a node myself or, if the metaphor may be laboured a little more, stood simultaneously at two. I had chosen to ignore the one; the dilemma of the other, smaller problem, lodge or garden, I solved in an ingenious way: I would attempt both tasks at once, devoting the cool mornings to the garden and the afternoons, which the sun made warm and pleasant, to the building. I determined to plant the equivalent of Nemione’s cross, our life, in my garden, and make it the basis of my design. This was difficult. Perhaps if I sited the building at the centre of the cross … but that precluded all additions. I might construct the cross-design in one’ quarter of the whole – such exquisite and nice considerations! The extensive gardens should both begin and complete my pleasure. The forbidden word again; it haunted me. A Green Wolf has every opportunity – is master of himself and of all the worldly delights I forbade myself. A Wolf would not linger in the cloister, hoping to catch a glimpse of Nemione. He would stride out to look for her.

‘I wanted to make nothing less than a shrine in which every object, animate or not, made spiritual sense. This is the reason for the incompleteness of the “wilderness” walks. They should be creations of artifice but I could not exclude such intruders as the wild rose and the coconut-scented gorse, nor these fine thistles and docks – and why waste genuine sports? I am even now too ambitious; and still too lazy to achieve all my ambitions.

‘Notwithstanding these outside imperfections, the interior of the building is, as you will see, in perfect order. We will climb the staircase (genuine porphyry – but mind the broken step!) and enter by the brazen doors which, yes, resemble more than a little the Gates of Paradise.’

The old man took a key from the leather wallet he wore on his sword belt, fitted it to the lock and turned it.

‘I love to entertain my visitors (few enough) with such speeches,’ he said. ‘They are props to the ailing structures of my mind. As for the palace – here it is. I cannot escape from it. It has swallowed me whole, mind and body, hates and loves, possessions, beliefs, gold – that which glisters and is my fool’s reward and grail attained.

‘Since I am the one you never forget, it will be easier if I show you round. I’ll make you regret your memories of me! The grand tour I think, the one that takes in all the sights, leaves not a stone unturned. I do not have the resilience of some, not now. I lack the boldness of those outside.

‘Here we are. I’ll close the door – it lets in too much light, and also dirt, from outside. This is the chamber in which I was born. You must begin at the beginning, you see, if you are to make sense of my memory palace.’

His guest craned his head forward as he tried to distinguish from the general gloom the heavy pieces of furniture with which the room was furnished.

‘Could we have a little light?’ he asked.

‘A glimmer!’ His guide struck a match and lit a small bull’s-eye lantern. But even with this it was hard to make anything out – the furniture seemed very big and also far away, the sort of dim and massive wooden giants he remembered from early childhood, of bottomless chests, cavernous wardrobes and tables as big as houses. He stepped gingerly forward.

There was a bed. The covers were partly thrown back, white sheets, blue blankets and a patchwork quilt. He might just about manage to climb up. His teddy bear lay on the quilt; the smell was right – Castile soap and eau de Cologne, a faint overlay of sweat.

‘Mummy?’ he said and heard the dry laugh of the old man with the lantern.

‘Sorry, young man. I cannot preserve your memories.’

‘But this is my mother’s bed; where I was born, not you.’

The old man laughed again.

‘That remains to be seen,’ he said. ‘The case as yet is unproven.’

Guy read the book review in the centre pages of his newspaper. It spoke highly of a new biography of the Jesuit priest and scholar of Chinese, Matteo Ricci, who in the sixteenth century had invented a mnemonic system which used an imaginary building, such as a palace, and its furnishings as an aid to memorizing (for example) tenets of the Catholic faith. When published for his Chinese patron, Ricci’s method attracted many converts: the memory palace was open to guests, who used its courts and statuary to understand the new faith. Guy shivered. This kind of thing happened all too often: he devised a fictional description or idea and, a few days later, read of it in the newspaper or heard someone describe it on the radio.

He re-read the article, his imagination caught and held by his parallel idea of a building full of memories, a cenotaph of reality as phantom-like as memory itself, and then, remembering he was on holiday, he turned to the sports pages. He read the breakdown of the cricket scores and forgot them immediately. The last lines of an old story came to mind: ‘“Damn you,’” she scrawled across the parchment, “you sucking incubus, you salivating fiend from the abyss, you who have stolen my voice and left me with shadows; left me nothing but a dark palace peopled with ghosts and my fantasies.’”

The words sank beneath the troubled surface of his mind. He looked out of the windows: these huge sheets of glass could not be described as portholes, nor anything nautical, and belonged to the holiday fantasy. The sea was calm and sunlit; the busy Channel, on which the traffic moved as steadily as on the motorway, had a peaceful, purposeful air. He enjoyed being at sea and let his gaze wander over the other holidaymakers in the room. The girl had gone, it was mostly families – someone had left a hat on a nearby chair, a familiar, frayed straw with a wide brim and a loose band of white chiffon. He remembered where he had seen it: by the Congo, the Amazon, the Nile, the Ganges – all on TV; and by the Thames when its owner, Etta Travis, had leaned on the Embankment wall beside him. After somebody’s party. They had talked about the river below them; what treasures, such as the Battersea Shield, it had given up; what might remain concealed beneath the succulent mud. Then Etta had run suddenly after a taxi, hailing it with her hat; and she and the famous hat had been whisked away into the summer night.

Etta was approaching him from the bar, a glass of wine in her hand.

‘Guy!’ She had a pleasant voice, was pleasant altogether and feminine, always dressed in skirts, never trousers, even in the remotest outback, jungle or prairie, her habitat so much more than the streets of London. They were long skirts of gauzy Indian material; indigenous peoples respected her because of them, she maintained. Yet, if her style had not been so well-known, such dress would have been anachronistic here amongst the garish shorts and jingoistic tee-shirts of the other passengers.

She retrieved her hat and sat down beside him.

‘This is a prosaic way to begin an adventure,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘I’m on holiday – on my way to a cousin in Tuscany. Yourself?’

‘Likewise. Just drifting. Jilly’s in New York – exhibition.’

‘I saw it in The Times. What beautiful work! I must buy some for myself before it all disappears into the mansions of the seriously rich!’

They continued to make small talk. He was disappointed in her: an anthropologist who travelled the world as she did should be incapable of such chit-chat. He wanted her to tell him tales of centaurs, mermen and sirens, long yarns of her perils amongst the anthropophagi; to fulfil the fantasies he, and her viewing and reading public, had of her wading through crocodile-infested rivers, smoking with head-hunters, chewing coca high in the Andes – and always commentating, telling everyone what, why and wherefore. In exchange he wanted to tell her of the places he knew well, those way beyond her wide experience, those she – however determined she was, however much she desired to explore them – might only visit by proxy in his storyteller’s magic shoes: the eternal forests, endless plains and everlasting cities of Malthassa. She met extraordinary characters, he created them; he explored an internal world, but hers was external and bounded by space and time, by the present and only time she could experience: this crowded bar, these inane, sentimental, holiday-making Brits.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, this is a slow old way to reach Italy,’ he remarked. ‘I should fly.’

‘My car’s down below. I shall take a few days over it, drive south, maybe east into Switzerland, drop down Europe that way –’

‘No undiscovered peoples?’

‘Europe gave up her secrets long ago. Excuse me now –’ She drained her glass. ‘Or will you join me for lunch?’

‘I’ll wait until I can get some French cooking.’

‘It’s habit with me: eat what’s available in case there isn’t any more. Goodbye, Guy – nice to see you again. Bonne chance!’

‘Bonne route!’

The interlude with Etta Travis had made him restless. He gathered his books together: perhaps he should buy something for his son – but what kind of boy was Dominic? What were his tastes? Should he buy some small gift for Helen? He made his way through the crowds, towards the duty-free shop.

The reception area near the shop was thronged; he had not realized before how busy the ship was. Lots of people, mostly young backpackers, sitting on the floor; some seasickness cases lying flat. Someone should clear a passage: what if there was an emergency? He was stepping over and amongst the bodies when his gaze, always quick to interpret the printed word, was arrested. One of the poor sailors had fallen asleep with a book open in her hand. He could just about make out five words at the page-heads: Lèni la Soie and Evil Life. He knew something of Lèni, Silk Lèni, poor French silk worker, prostitute and accomplice of a psychopathic priest beheaded (for that, call it what you will, ‘guillotined’ or, dully, ‘executed’, was what had been done to him) in Lyon in 1884. Helen Lacey had kept the original of Lèni’s diary in her gaudy gypsy van; presumably had it still, unless it had been consumed in the fire. The acrid smell had filled his lungs and filtered into every one of his garments, remaining there for weeks, a distillation which evoked the heap of smouldering ash which was all that remained of the van and its ornate fittings.

The sleeper stirred. Now he must notice her whom he, on holiday to escape his personal Furies, had tried to ignore: the blonde girl in baggy-kneed leggings and loose shirt; the girl, of no more than sixteen or seventeen years, who was so naively beautiful.

The book – the god-forsaken book! It had slithered to the floor and closed. He could read the words, printed over the drawing of a guillotine blade, on the cover:

THE EVIL LIFE OF SILK LENI CURSED BY HER BEAUTY, CONDEMNED BY HER APPETITES, LENI WAS DAMNED

There was a conspiracy. Some devilish conjunction of memories and events was following after him, was there before he had time to think or act. This girl, whom he had noticed drinking lager in the bar, was like the one he’d given a lift to, or thought he had: the mute (for she still slept) expression of some kind of prevision or hallucination, a being he had brought into life by thinking. She looked like ghostly Alice Naylor.

Nonsense! A daydream, a girl, a book he should have known about. These added up to nothing more sinister than coincidence – and perhaps it was stupid to try to combine a restful holiday with a visit to his one-time lover and their son.

A little regretful because he wanted to steal the girl’s book and read it at once, he made a mental note to buy a copy when he got home, stepped clear and paused to look back. The girl was stretching, her regular Quattrecento angel’s lips drawn back, her mouth open in a wide yawn. He reached into his pocket and extracted his sunglasses; put them on. Now invisible in his disguise as an older but fashion-conscious and confident man he entered the duty-free perfumery, where he was again confronted by the id-Sandy, black jacket open, scarlet, lacquered nails closed eloquently about her conductor’s baton: a symbolic prelude indeed! Now Helen’s favourite perfume – would he find that here? He remembered its name perfectly: ‘Sortilège’ – Spell.

The car ferry Spirit of Adventure passed easily through the crowded waters of English Channel. Her wide decks were dazzling in the sunlight, her red, white and blue logo and liveries placed and labelled her; she came to Calais, if not precisely in peace, at least in the certainty of commerce.

Most of the vehicles that clanged off her car decks were family conveyances, big, new, shiny – but crammed with luggage, children and their toys. Henrietta Travis drove a small Peugot and was alone. She glimpsed Guy’s flash red car behind her and smiled. He would be taking the autoroute, eating up kilometres and fuel while she, on routes nationales and by-ways, headed for Alsace – or the Franche-Comté. She would take the road for Reims, make no firm decision yet. The sun still shone, hours before dark – but now, there was a delay, one of those inexplicable stoppages common to all traffic queues. After ten or fifteen minutes, they began to move again and soon were rolling past the barriers. No one stopped Etta.