The Memory Palace

‘Dominic’s mother?’

She must have guessed it.

‘How do you know?’

‘I read your letter when you went for a pee.’

It was the sort of thing Helen herself would have done; that this Alice had pried in his guilt did not make him angry, but irrationally fearful. She was cheeky and unpredictable, that was all, he reasoned, the child of a broken home; and he had left the letter and the postcard on the dashboard.

‘Why did Dominic send you the picture of a horse?’ Alice continued.

‘Thought you’d read my books.’

‘Not all. I suppose there is a horse like that in one of them.’

‘Right! The Ima, who live in the Plains of Malthassa, herd horses – we were talking about them earlier, when we passed the sign that said “J-J Rousseau”. The best ones belong to the Imandi, their leader, and the best one of all is the Red Horse.’

‘What colour was Helen’s horse? I can’t remember.’

Again he was disturbed. He was sure he had not revealed Helen’s name; and Dominic had not written it down. He had not told her what colour the horse was either: he was certain of that.

‘I didn’t tell you,’ he said. ‘She was brown and white – skewbald, or “coloured” in gypsy parlance. They prize pied animals highly.’

‘Half and half, like good and evil; neither one thing or another, like me,’ Alice said and then, before he could respond to this new slant upon her puzzling character, reached forward and reinforced his unsettled mood with a fresh CD.

‘You don’t have to do that each time,’ he said. ‘Put in a stack.’

‘I want this one.’

Clapton again; and the album was called Backtrackin’ – what he was at, to drive half way down France on this fool’s errand; doubly a fool for picking up this precocious waif? Well, it wasn’t so far to Auxerre, where he would drop her. She would easily find another lift there, or a room if she intended to stay overnight. He listened to the music and felt the morass of nostalgia stir and individual memories rise up like wraiths.

They had reached Burgundy and were passing a sign to Sens. The landscape was rich and rolling: you could see how lords and princes had prospered here, he thought, and built their chateaux forts and later on, when there was a kind of peace, their tree-embowered, swan-encircled chateaux set like still islands in a motionless sea, so formal were the pleasure gardens. As if to echo these thoughts, a brown road sign with a formalized chateau, turreted and neat, came into view and, beyond it, the edge of the forest which covered the hills on either side of the road. Other signs warned of deer, though a high deer fence marched with the margins of the wood.

‘They used to hunt all the time here,’ he said. ‘In the Middle Ages. In fact, Saint Thibaud loved the hunt so much that in his church, ahead of us in Joigny, he is shown on horseback, off to the chase with his dog. And Archbishop Sanglier was of course known only as “The Boar”. I wonder, was he a thickset, muscular man, a grasping priest who loved the riches which gave him the freedom to hunt? – the riches of Mother Church. There is a famous Treasury in the abbey at Sens.’

‘Wasn’t it in Sens,’ the girl said, ‘that Abélard was condemned?’

How could she know that – a history lesson at school?

‘Not for loving Héloise,’ he said, ‘but for an intellectual sin: for refusing to set limits to the activity of human reason.’

‘Reason? Peter Abélard?’

‘He was a great churchman as well as a lover. A formidable intellect! Though, it is remarkable that he did not lose his reason after he was set upon.’

‘Thinking was all he had left,’ she said. ‘Thinking of Héloise and praying.’

‘Excuse me – but you’ve studied the period in class?’

‘Oh, no. They don’t tell us young wenches about castration. ‘Taint a fit subject for a liddle gal.’

Phoebe spoke like this sometimes, putting on the accents of a yokel.

‘Oh, ah,’ he replied in kind, looked full at her and caught her watching him. He knew then he had won that joust – this time she had not fooled him into a delusion – and continued casually,

‘Burgundy is famous for happier things as well.’

‘I bet you wouldn’t say that if you lived in the Middle Ages!’

‘I don’t suppose I would. But look, here’s another reminder of hunting: a service station called L’Aire de la Biche – the Hind’s Place. Would you like a coffee?’

‘Please!’

They sat opposite each other at the table. She drank her black coffee and eagerly devoured a large slice of gâteau. This is the first time she has eaten today, he thought and asked her ‘Would you like a proper meal?’

‘Later?’ she said, the question mark riding high in her voice.

A woman was watching them with unconcealed curiosity; he had seen several men glance and he leaned back and looked at the girl as if to confirm that he saw what the others saw. She had the kind of beauty many men divorced good wives to gain, that unknown and conjectured many who would envy him, escorting her – if that was the correct term for his role in this surreal interlude.

‘Later?’ she had said. Although an interval of time had passed, he decided to reply.

‘OK. Later on.’

He saw the shape of her clearly now, both intellectual and physical, and in that moment knew that he would try to seduce her, though his conscience would attempt to save them from this pleasurable and questionable conclusion. Sandy was well into her thirties; this girl was little more than a child. He calculated. Thirty-two years separated them, at least.; but he wouldn’t be the first – there was that Stone. OK. And several Country singers. He opened the sun-roof when they were back in the car and again drove fast, breaking the speed limit. He knew, without looking, that Alice was smiling with pleasure, heard her laugh as she held down her slip-streaming hair. It was about fifty miles to Auxerre. Soon the town rose up in the hills on their right-hand side and ‘There’s the cathedral,’ Alice said.

He remembered Saint Edward’s, where he had been choirboy and chorister; another time, another country, almost another religion, his, pared down from the excesses of Catholicism. His conscience gave a feeble flutter. Polanski, it said.

‘I’ll drop you in Auxerre,’ he offered.

‘I’d rather come with you!’

She had said it, condemning him. He felt his lust recognized and justified.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you are absolutely sure.’

‘Oh, absolutely!’

A little later, when they were paused at the tollbooth, the girl laughed softly and said, ‘My father is always telling me not to accept lifts from strangers.’ He gave his daughters the same advice.

‘What can I say to that,’ he asked her, ‘without being totally flippant?’

‘You could say – “Soon, I won’t be a stranger”!’ She laughed again.

They left the autoroute and took a lesser road which followed the course of the Yonne. The signposts said ‘Avallon’. While intelligence and education told him that the name must be derived from that of a long-dead Celt, the chieftain in these wooded lands, an older and intuitive sense recalled Avalon, the island vale Arthur was carried to in death. Dusk inhabited the roadsides and waited in the trees. They passed through Lucy-le-bois. He felt heavy with fatigue and unwanted symbolism.

In Avallon, he was pleased to see, the houses were tall with open shutters laid back against stone walls; trees in the squares, flowers in troughs. A civilized place. The town was quiet, as if its citizens had already retired to bed. No one about to witness the betrayal of his conscience. Yet he drove past the big Hotel d’Etoile and parked in a narrow street. The silence of the town invaded the car. He sat still and the girl beside him did not move.

While the car, as its expanded metals cooled, made the only noises to be heard, he unfastened his seat belt and twisted in his seat until he faced her. He felt that he should make some overture or heartfelt confession which would sanctify what he proposed.

But Alice’s unfathomed sensibilities moved faster.

‘Avallon,’ she said, pronouncing the word in the English fashion.

‘Av-eye-yon.’

‘I know.’

‘Or Arcadia?’ he asked her. ‘Paradise?’

‘Paradise? Not yet – look, there’s a hotel. At the end of the street.’

He held her face in both hands and kissed her, at once wanting all of her – but ‘wait’ his noisy conscience said and he released her. She laughed loudly and, putting on a new accent, said,

‘’Ow romantic!’ She laid her head against his chest and laughed again. They both laughed, rocking in their seats, releasing their tension into the stuffy air.

‘Come on, Miss Essex,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

The dusty footpath was only wide enough for one. They walked in the road, hand-in-hand. He looked at his watch.

‘We’ll eat. First,’ he said.

The hotel restaurant was papered in red, and shabby. He read the menu quickly and, while Alice studied it, looked about him, embarrassed. He had erred. It looked the kind of place to which commercial travellers brought their pick-ups. The red paper made him think of hell, not paradise (though, conceptually, what was the difference, both asylums for different breeds of ecstatics?). The fires burned low for want of heretics and adulterers to incinerate. He peered into the gloom and made out a waitress lingering by the kitchen door. Near her, a bizarre group sat at dinner – French, a family – and he recognized the hotel proprietor who had booked them in. Perhaps the waitress was his wife? Who, then was the other middle-aged woman; who were the other women? Two sons and an idiot – correction, a boy with learning difficulties: three sons?

The waitress saw him staring and began ferociously to cut bread. She laid a long loaf on the board and brought down the guillotine blade, bang! bang! bang! He winced. She brought the bread to them and he watched it reforming its squashed self while he gave the order. Alice was mute. He chose a salad for her, lamb, pommes Lyonnaises; the wine. How bad would it be?

‘Monsieur,’ the waitress said, in mangled English. “As good flavour.’

‘“Taste”, Madame,’ he corrected stiffly.

Alice yelped and stuffed her table napkin in her mouth – but the food, despite the odd family, the wallpaper, the dust he could see griming the dado rail, after all was good. He poured a young Beaujolais. It waited in his glass, a toast to Fortune, Life and Youth. He lifted the glass. She was waiting, too, red-blooded adolescence, reciprocal sensation imprisoned in her pretty cage of flesh. She smiled at him and, from the tail of his eye, he saw the family file silently from the room.

‘Now we’re alone,’ said Alice.

‘Near enough.’

She drank.

‘Hello,’ she said.

The time came. They mounted the stairs. The same red wallpaper enhanced the gloom. A low-wattage bulb lighted the turning of the stair; they went higher and there, nearly opposite the lavatory, was their room: 18. The age of reason and responsibility.

‘How old are you?’ he said abruptly as he opened the door.

She affected not to hear. It was not a question he could repeat – not without seeming a total fool – and they passed into the room. The stark central light was on. Her rucksack stood beside his grip on a little luggage stand. The bed was turned down.

Alice spoke: ‘What a place! Wow!’ and ran to open the window.

‘It’s all right. The linen’s clean,’ he said, while realizing he had misinterpreted her words and actions. She was leaning out of the window. The light curtains billowed about her and a hot breeze shoved the musty air of the room aside.

‘We’re in the roof! It’s miles down to the street – I can see your car dozing there as if it was in its own comfy garage, not forced to spend the night outside the police station.’

‘At least no one will try to nick it.’

He too crossed the room; stood behind her. So close, he did not know what to make – of himself, nor her who continued to lean out and report on what she saw with the enthusiasm and fresh vision of minority. Questions marshalled in his mind: Why? Shall I leave – before it’s too late? Is this a legitimate adventure? A sordid romp? While he pondered, he caressed her shoulder, at last permitting his hand to journey down her supple back and gently touch her clefted buttocks in their absurdly thick tights – leggings. No pants. No bra. She must have removed those two surplus (for their purposes) garments when she went to the loo. Her breasts. Against the windowsill.

He could not think. He was entranced. But the girl left the window, brushing past him as if he was already old news. He watched her explore the room, the wardrobe with its extra blanket and pillows for those too soft to sleep comfortably on the French-style bolster, rolled in the end of the sheet; the curtained enclosure which hid the washbasin and eccentric plumbing; the two religious pictures. She undid her backpack; took out washbag, underclothes, a hairbrush, her book.

He hung his jacket on a chair and sat on the bed, his resolution fading; rolled over and looked in the bedside cabinet where, on a shelf above a chamber pot, he found a Gideon bible. That these expressions of human spirituality and grossness should be displayed in such close proximity amused him, and he laughed out loud.

‘What have you found?’

‘The bible and the pot de chambre.’

‘Is that funny?’

‘Only if we need either.’

‘I’m quite godless,’ she said, ‘and I bet you are too.’

‘I –’ he said, hesitating over the sentence (‘used to be a choirboy’? ‘was married in church’? ‘am married to a rather devout Christian’?) ‘I am undecided –’

It was an expression of his state, now, here. He stood up and switched off the light. At once, the context dissolved, the absurd conversation, the prevarication. Night was a better landscape for an amorous conjunction. There must be a moon. Her garments were luminous in the pallid light: her body would have the same lucent quality. He began to be excited: no more words. He approached her swiftly, conscious of the sweat and grime on him, the wine on his breath.

This was not what he’d imagined – champagne, a better room. Beside her he was a rampant giant and for an instant wondered: will she protest? The texture of her unshent skin made him delirious. He bent to take her offered kisses and, as he felt her warm, dry hands upon him, it occurred to him – a new horizon, a fresh Darien – that

the white beer I had consumed, following on the three ritual glasses of kumiz, was doubtless to blame – but there was no time to think further, blaming mere beverages. I had chosen carefully, deliberately; had won the only girl of the year to bear faint resemblance to Nemione Baldwin, a scrawny witch of a creature with a sweep of hair as yellow as the sheaved corn. The contest, to a renegade Wolf, had been simplicity, a matter of judgement rather than ability, some skill in aiming at the narrow target.

I waited, the corn stalks pricking my bare thighs. That I should sit here at all was accident. Tired of my journey and the prospect of more fighting, I had remained on the itinerant smith’s wagon; so, arrived in this village, a poor rat-haunted place on the very hem of the Plains, where a rash of small cornfields competed for bare unattractiveness with scorched pastures where grazed a few horses the Ima had outworn. I had known nothing of the summer festival I walked into, combined propitiation and celebration. Strangers were scarce. The old women had pounced on me and, in truth, they were like corn rats themselves, bright eyed and chattering, nipping at my arms and shoulders with little snatches and tugs. The young women had been driven (mirthful though they were) into a ruinous barn on the edge of the field. I contested with the village youths and one other unfortunate stray, a fat itinerant horse-butcher, upon a shooting-ground which resembled the Green Wolves’ butts as little as my prize did the fair novice-turned-thaumaturge.

Here she came, walking delicately in bare feet across the stubble, veiled in dirty white. As she drew nearer I saw that her bridal veil was an old flour sack.

Well, I had got myself into these curious circumstances.

It was a long time since I had had a woman.

I felt pity rather than desire; also an absurd shame which quickened when I thought that these ignoble deeds must, when they had become memories, be kept with the jewels in the memory palace. I moved the sacking aside and looked into her thin face, averting my eyes from the rest of her wasted body.

‘You need not, mistress, if I do not please you,’ I said. It was a poor attempt at the courtesies I had been taught in boyhood. But that, too, was past.

‘I must,’ she whispered. I had difficulty in understanding her dialect: ‘I want,’ was what she seemed to say.

‘Then where is our bed?’

‘Here, on the dry ground,’ she said; or was it: ‘On the fruitful earth’? – and, without more ado, she flung the sack from her and eagerly knelt upon it where it fell. I hastened to kneel with her; but I wondered, were we about to pray?

‘One thing,’ she said. ‘Before – why me?’

This, I understood, looking askance on my lower body which, independent of my intellect, had begun to prepare itself for the lovers’ contest. Was I to be kind, or cruel?

‘You remind me of the woman I love,’ I said.

‘That is a good omen,’ the girl said.

‘Is she a good woman?’ the girl said.

I lay down in a confusion of body and mind, the myriad facets of my existence dancing in the air and crowding close about me on the rough sacking. The girl also lay down. For ten beats of my heart nothing happened, but the sun beat down; then she was there, covering me, and I thought that Famine rode till she kissed me and I remembered the unsurpassed smoothness of the beer they had given me. After this, her breasts might make milk as sweet as the thick, fermented kumiz.

That was the meaning of it all: a harvest, a child.

Or a simple adventure.

Was this the real meaning behind my voluntary diversion from the journey?

Of course! A simple – and delightful – adventure of a common kind, Guy assured himself. The quarry and reward of men down the centuries. If unlike his affairs with Helen, Susan, Diana, Sandy –

Alice Naylor, her character uncovered by his researches and by her final, unremitting presence in his house, had ingenuity and invention, most alive and most alluring in his dreams where her miserable expression was transformed to laughter; where she always refused him, closed and cold at the last moment even as he tried in vain to enter her.

This other Alice had known very well what she did, where to touch and how, so that, at last expiring in her he came to the summit of the highest pass, the zenith of his ambition; after which her involuted, tender succulence was his.

He watched her sleeping with no sense of guilt. The warm night enfolded him. France herself cradled him. He hardly knew her either: a few jaunts here and there, some holidays in various situations – there was a vastness, and also an unpredictability, about her which England did not have. In a bed, in a house, in a street, in a town, in a green province, in a wide country, lies my love – He grinned to himself in the dark.

In all the building, no sound. He thought of the weary proprietor and his family; wondered where they slept. Close by? In a separate wing?

He lay and sweated, cooling as the fluids dried. A door banged. Someone passed the door – perhaps. A car, long way away. Suddenly he was in the car, driving furiously; and instantly awake. Christ, how his body ached; hard to know which bit to stretch. Must remember – more petrol, postcards, pay the bills – no, on holiday. Now he was wide awake. He stretched out and switched on the lamp beside the bed; rolled slowly back to look again at the marvellous girl.

She lay on her right side, facing away, all white, the blonde hair like straw in a sunny field or the thin filaments of flax Rumplestiltskin span into gold for the king’s daughter. Her legs and arms were graceful, long; everything, breasts, belly, buttocks, neat and under-used. He looked again at those small breasts with their pale pink nipples, touched her shoulder gently, lifted her hair. Her face in repose was delicate; did have, indeed, the features of one of Sassetta’s angels. She still wore her ribbon. The black band tight around so long and white a neck disturbed him; he was not sure if his unease was spiritual or sexual; but ‘I’m quite godless,’ she had said. Curse the inaccuracies of the English vernacular! Did she mean ‘moderately’ or ‘totally’?

He touched the velvet ribbon gently, noticing how its silken edge bit into her neck.

The curious book she’d been reading on the ferry lay there, with her bits and pieces on the chair. He got up softly to fetch it; lay down and opened its lurid cover.

‘The Evil Life of Lèni la Soie.’ Inside was a frontispiece taken from a contemporary sketch; it showed a dishevelled beauty kneeling in prayer before a crucifix. Curious, he thought, how ready we are to accuse every whore and make of her a repentant Magdalen at once attractive and repellent. He turned the pages and found a short introduction.

‘France,’ it began, ‘called La Belle. Imagine two wide rivers and a city of tall stone houses, great squares where people walk, art galleries, churches, gardens, a ruined Gallo-Roman theatre high above the city. This is Lyon today.

‘Now let us imagine another scene. It is the latter half of the nineteenth century and the houses which cover the hilly quarter of Fourvière are falling down. This is the oldest quarter and those who live here, above the city but below the site of the new basilica, are also decaying from the harshness of life, from drink, from hunger. There is so little that even the rats have moved out, away to the Croix Rousse with the whores. Some of these evil-living women are thin, some fat; some even, to cater for all tastes, very old, wrinkled, dry; some are pregnant and some are as beautiful as Aphrodite. Lèni was such a one –’

Guy stopped reading, irritated by the present tense, drama-documentary style; plagued by recollections which streamed up as unstoppably as mist from wet ground in the sun. He had never known Lèni – how could he? She was dead – like the first Alice. He had not known Lèni, but he had read her diary, all the closely written confidential pages of it and could visualize her neat letters exactly and the brown limp-covered book itself, soft leather binding worn bald. It used to live, a landmark amongst the paperbacks, on the little shelf above the bed-place in the gypsy vardo and Helen, rising from him in her resplendent nakedness, had brought it down and shown it him, revealing at the same time her inmost thoughts, for she kept her own diary in it, and also in French. Somewhat bewildered he had read there that he, Guy Parados, was un trésor and also mon amant très fort et infatigable. Schoolgirl stuff on reflection, these days. He had grinned at her and said ‘Thanks! I hope I am,’ and had asked her why she wrote in French, not Romany.

‘It’s the language of lovers, isn’t it?’ she had replied.

He remembered some of Lèni’s entries. She had, he thought, compared her priestly lover to a stallion and herself she had personified as his breakfast. She had also implied that he was stupid: quel imbécile, quel désastre! Nothing else could be retrieved – except – yes, a homily as vapid as every cliché: ‘Fortune favours fools’, in Helen’s translation; but the French was Aux innocents les mains pleines which, translated literally, meant ‘To simpletons, filled hands’. The innocent, the idiot son of the family downstairs certainly had those, clasping tight his bread and biting into its crust. Guy leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes.

‘Pleine’ had another meaning, probably several, for sense in French was, as in English, governed by context. Ah! It meant ‘complete’ or ‘whole’.