The Memory Palace

He tucked them inside the road map of France and left his study with its confusion of books, papers and ideas; shut the door on it. In the bedroom, he rummaged, flinging socks, pants, shirts on the bed. Bliss it was to be alone, each member of his family far from home engaged in pursuits he could ignore, each task complete, all the bills paid with the monotony of forging sentence after sentence down the years: twelve volumes of his New Mythologies, the Koschei sequence; two other novels; three collections of short stories. And all the ghosts accounted for.

When he had packed his canvas grip he went downstairs. In the hall the ivy girl, the dryad his wife had carved a dozen years ago, bore her containment with grace. She was but half a girl, the remainder a contorted and leafy stem from which she stretched up, always reaching for the moon – his children called her, simply, ‘Ivy’ and hung their hats and coats upon her limbs. Just now, she wore a cricketer’s sunhat on her tangled head and a silky Indian scarf about her slender waist. He took the keys to the Audi from her outstretched hand.

‘Goodbye, Alice, I’ll soon be back,’ he said softly, speaking to the household ghost; but she did not answer him. Instead, the tawny owl called from his roost in the cedar tree, ‘Who-o-o-o?’

Dark now, enough for stars. He walked on the lawn and looked up at them. They used to shine more brightly; he had forgotten the names of their constellations. He looked at the fantastic bulk of the house with its turrets, machicolations and flying buttresses. A fancy place for a man of the cloth – but a good home for a writer of Fantasy. He had already paid off the mortgage.

The car was still on the drive – he hadn’t bothered to garage it the night before. He had paid for that too. Any top-of-the range car would have done but he had always had an Audi of one kind or another, since his first successes. He moaned about the cost of it, and enjoyed it.

The red car was his escape vehicle, deliverance from jail. He laid the map on the passenger seat and flung his grip into the back. Perhaps he would stop in Christminster, see Sandy; perhaps not – and, for once, decisions did not matter. Nothing mattered, except one fact: that he was now on holiday. On the road, he sat alert in his speeding chair, in control. The car filled the quiet, starlit lanes with noise and rushing lights but, within, cushioned from the world, he found and felt a new intensity, a rebirth of the spirit, free of its monetary and marital chains. That was the illusion. He cherished it.

On Ottermoor he turned aside from the A-road, braked gently and stopped the car beside a gateway. He stretched the ache from his hands, unbent himself and got out. The shire lay before him, silent, dark; it might have been a haven of hope, a place to nurse – what? Not ambition: he had had enough. Dreams? There were too many. Those big fields and the marshy thickets which were all that was left of the old moor were spoiled, despoiled: by today’s constellations, the clusters of orange lights above a roundabout; by the whisper of tyres which had replaced the song of the wind; by the small size of the modern world, forever shrinking, caving in upon itself. He could hardly see the moon for manufactured light. There were no otters.

The morning blazed upon him. Another scorcher. He adjusted the air conditioning and the sun visors, put his sunglasses on, flipped through the CDs, selected – ah, the old favourite, Layla. It flung him straight back, into 1973; and yet was just sound, a pop song; he felt none of the despair – no, the anguish with which he used to experience the song. ‘Darling! Won’t you, please?’ In those days he had not known what to expect of the next day, much less the future undefined and, while he wondered how (and where) he might seduce Helen Lacey, wailed internally with the music, wrote short stories, went to parties, danced with a variety of women, even with his wife – what was a party in the seventies if it was not a long dalliance to music, truly a series of sexual overtures? ‘You’ve got me on my knees.’ No more. He was mature, old to some, and he knew how the world wagged. He turned the volume up and felt return also, as he passed a string of company cars, the sense of adventure and urgency which had set him going; he forgot his painful hands. They, the suited men with order books and briefcases, must be thinking (for they had seen him coming up, a red dot in their mirrors), ‘There the bastard goes.’

Here on the motorway time and motion, art and science, were united. On the endless ribbon flowed, grey lanes merging and parting, pale bridge-arches springing nimbly, artfully, over the traffic, gone to be forgotten as the music played. He ought to slow down but the fast car’s marque was a logo and an advertisement of his abandonment to the luxury of speed. The four linked circles on the bonnet were symbols of the diverse worlds he had set out to pass through, but not linger in. He had become a gypsy with no goal but the next horizon.

Names and numbers flicked by. The names of the service stations were more relevant than those of places, directionally astray, for the new geography of the motorway had obscure rules where north, south, east and west were always left. The traffic moved frenetically, dancing down the shimmering lanes. He was a part of the cavalcade, held safely in the steel and upholstery of his car, passing from lane to lane, putting his foot down, overtaking with all the energy and dynamics of the vehicle at his command. Outside the ever-changing constant life of the road, the blue lamps glimpsed ahead and the smooth deceleration to a steady seventy; fellow-travellers gliding by, black, white or Indian, once a Dormobile full of red-necked Australians. Lorries were a species apart on high: Norbert Dentressangle, Christiaan Salvesen, Geest and Reem Lysaght. A transporter bore yet more, cars to fill the M25, a fleet of new Renault space wagons with the iridescent colours of beetles’ wings, metallic green, bronze, amaranth, blue.

‘Bloody caravans,’ he muttered as he passed a swaying line of them. Caravan of caravans? Caravans of dreams? Squat wagons, like him in going south pursuit of lost ideals; lightly and impossibly named: the Sprite, the Lapwing, the Pageant, the Corniche, their destinations uncorrupted birds, whispering salt marshes and the sea, the easy hedonism of topless beaches in the South of France, castles (in Spain perhaps) or moated chateaux lapped by vineyards where wine could be tasted and bought.

Helen’s painted caravan had been the gateway to ecstasy.

The aching sensation returned again on the M26. He flexed his hands against the wheel. Sod it. But he wasn’t going back. Some aspirin or paracetamol would settle it or that new stuff, what was it, Nurofen? Check with a doctor – in Dover maybe? No. He would leave all that behind him, with Sandy, Jilly and the family stuff, and the completed The Making of Koschei.

He pulled off the glaring tarmac into a service station. It was called The Clover Patch, and he laughed cynically. He felt tired and persecuted. A group of lorry drivers stared at him, and at the 20V: envy. He paid for his coffee, drank it quickly and, on the way out, bought a paper.

Ten minutes later, he stopped a second time to pick up a hitch-hiker, a young blonde. She did not appreciate his car nor the acceleration it was capable of; he could see one of her hands, tightly gripping the material of her loose, art student’s smock, and she sat silent, utterly without small talk. On the busy motorway he had no chance to turn his head and be polite, smile at her.

‘Going far? Dover?’ he asked.

‘I dunno,’ she returned and he, the writer, the man whose business was with language, was immediately struck by the earthiness of her accent. ‘I’ was almost ‘Oi’. He negotiated a way past a coach and glanced at her, about to ask: Was she born in his shire? She returned his look, a sprite of ancient mischief capering in her speedwell eyes; and yet there was a deadness on them, a dull glaze of the kind he had seen when he drowned the blue-eyed kittens. She could not be, she was – very like the hanged girl, Alice Naylor. It was luck, some whim of a guardian demon, that he did not steer into the crash barrier, and the girl lurched forward in her seat.

‘For God’s sake, do up your seat belt,’ he said, took one hand from the wheel and passed it over his face.

He overtook a pair of lorries, trembling with the effort, and had to tuck himself in smartly behind a minibus. The leading driver leaned on his horn. The fast lane was empty. He veered out to a chorus of horns, and accelerated. 85, 90, 100, 110 – what was the engine capable of? He glanced to his left: the girl had gone, vanished just as Alice Naylor used, without a goodbye or a smile, to leave him in turmoil, bereft and aching to touch her beautiful, insubstantial body. Could Alice have followed him? Was this an omen or merely a sign of his mental exhaustion? He could not answer his own questions and concentrated on the indisputable reality of his fast and powerful car.

He stopped at the next service station and, in the gents, dashed water across his face and drank huge quantities from his cupped hands. His face, in the mirror above the basin, looked perfectly normal. It was the weather; too much hard work, this last week, his imagination fired up and unable to rest. In France he would shake off these dangerous fancies; and the aching hands. The phantom hitch-hiker! People did not, of course, hitch-hike on motorways. He laughed, and bit off the sound immediately as the door opened and a half-unzipped hulk of a lorry captain walked in and casually showered the urinal with pungent golden rain.

In the car, he first switched on the radio: normality, sound bites of news and chat; next bathed his shattered ego in tacky Queen: amazing how they had kept on going, changing style and image, yet turning out the same old reliable performance. ‘Another one,’ they sang, ‘Another one BIT THE DUST’ He was in Dover, automatically had slowed to a sedate street pace. A woman with a buggy standing still to watch him, some boys on bikes. What a fool he’d been back there, driving so dangerously. Lucky no police. The player switched moods for him: Bach, clear and refreshing as water, a quality fugue; anyone could play Queen.

A long sleep somewhere south of Paris, he thought – in a small country hotel with a good restaurant. He handed his ticket to a taciturn collector and was given a boarding card. No need for the passport here, though despite the Community some officials were – officious; but I’ll need it for the bloody bank, in France. That poster: ‘Prelude’, the perfume Sandy wants. Does she see herself like that, stretched on a grand piano at dawn, waiting, naked under a dinner jacket, a conductor’s baton in her hand?

A man was waving him on. He drove across the tarmac acreages of the port into a moving queue, bumped up the ramp.

Once upon a time he had been a poor storyteller, one of those who lived in a figurative garret and strove away at his art. He no longer thought of it as Art, that was too presumptuous, too precious a name for his hacking; yet it was still an art and something he had always been guilty of practising, the telling of stories – since early childhood: ‘Mummy, Mummy! There’s a wolf in the wardrobe!’ ‘Muum! I saw three monkeys up the apple tree!’ Unaided, he had turned this facility for imagining the worst and the most bizarre into a career.

Guy settled into the reclining chair but did not open the newspaper he had bought on the road. His eyes ran with tiredness and his hands needed to be bent, stretched and massaged one upon the other. It was hard to break off, be free. He had left the two communications from his unknown son in the car, the postcard with the picture of the hairy Lascaux horse and the brief letter, and so must rely on memory to peruse – the letter, one in a pile from his fans, had dropped into the placid pool of his existence and stirred it up – he had known nothing of this child, Helen’s boy; heard nothing – she had left him in December ’73. He had not even known she was pregnant! Then, less than a fortnight ago: ‘Dear Father –’

Dominic skied and played rugby, ‘not cricket like you.’ He had been born in Lyon – born fully grown into his father’s consciousness, nearly seventeen, to take fourth place in the hierarchy of his children between Phoebe and Ellen. There was no photograph; he must imagine what a handsome lad (or bulky prop-forward) resulted from his union with Helen. Dominic was also a reader. The card referred to the alternative world of the New Mythologies: ‘This reminds me of the Red Horse of the Plains’ – and, indeed, the sturdy Neolithic animal, if it were caparisoned in catamount skins and bridled with leather cut from the hide of a forest ape, would pass for one of the Imandi’s herd, a durable mount for one of the Brothers of the Green Wolf.

A wave of guilt passed through him, winding the tension up: he exercised his taut hands once more. He had said nothing to Jilly. No need.

His son’s final sentences were the most arresting, the ones he had been fed: ‘I am to tell you that Mother knows you are a handsome and successful storyteller who has learned all the skills of life and loving. She longs to confirm in the flesh what she has read.’ Then, the clincher, the reiteration of the announcement which had driven him to finish his book and set off for the unknown: ‘Your son, Dominic’.

Yesterday. All was yesterday.

Yesterday, when the painters had at last gone home and left the stinging smell of gloss paint behind them, evening had enveloped the stuffy house, wrapping it in a pause, an interval of quiet. For a while no vehicle had passed on the road beyond the wide lawn with its twin cedars and monkey-puzzle. The heat was Capricornian, tropical: a bath in which he was immersed to be boiled gently, to be done to a turn. It summoned unlikely longings to lie with ice-maidens or with the cruel Snow Queen; to plunge into the eternal cold, there forever to die; to have no identity, to be himself no longer.

To be, he had thought, to be nothing, nil, no more man but flesh, dead meat decaying to the bone and then to earth, all one with what was and will be.

The smell of paint and turps had been pervasive and perhaps accounted for the light-headedness he had felt; he was mildly poisoned, a middle-aged solvent-sniffer. He had sat by the open study window and watched the shadows gather beneath the rose bushes. The house remembered, its garden a notebook on whose pages many had sketched their designs. The gold and white pillar-rose marked the place where he had first seen Alice Naylor, knowing who she was, and the memory of it to this day lingered with him, a corrupt but sweet odour which counterpointed his memories of her whose brief life had been brought abruptly to a premature close by the hangman’s noose. He had lost count of the times he had seen Alice as she walked about the Old Rectory, or sat quietly on an invisible stool in the very heart of her enemy, the Church Victorious’s camp. Her face – which death had drained of all colour – always wore an expression of profound terror and about her neck was a purple scar, where the hangman’s rope had bitten her.

He had turned quickly from these painful memories to the other story, the fiction on the computer screen. One or two paragraphs were needed before the final lines he had already composed. He had forced his hands to type.

The frenetic mood, which had overtaken him at the start of the summer and remained with him, had subsided. He leaned back in the chair and took deep lungfuls of the hot and stale air. The ship vibrated as her engines turned; she stirred and trembled as no car ever could, almost alive, wanting to be under way – this most ordinary cross-Channel ferry. Sunlight slanted into his eyes and he masked them with his sunglasses.

How is it that I let myself be troubled by the past? He sank once more into yesterday, physically conscious of his hands. He remembered his initial panic at the intermittent ache: Is it a symptom of the advancing years? Must I learn to live with this neural gnawing, toothache of the tendons; appreciate it for what it is, my particular and personal infirmity, my own mnemonic for mortality – a pocket vanitas or portable skull-surmounted tomb. The escapement shudders, the sands run faster through the glass isthmus – Is it arthritis? Something worse? Incurable? The shadow that stalks us all.

Sandy’s explanation was small comfort. Three initials, RSI, encompassed and explained his ills.

In the car last night his hands had kept troubling him. He had tried to forget the pain on the motorway; to lose it in speed – always being ready for the police in their unmarked cars. It was a short stretch before ‘Christminster’ flashed up its exit number and he fled around the intersection roundabouts and drove more sedately along the Badbury Road.

That way, you missed the dreaming spires. Unless? God damn his habit of turning every thought inside out to discover its psychic symbolism. But fucking Sandy was easy: she gave as good as she got; and he had been in need. He parked the Audi behind her Escort and opened the garden gate. There were shadows on the kitchen blind and he was about to put his key in the lock when a peal of female laughter from the open window made him cautious. He rang the bell: Dr A.F. Mayhew – my literate sex therapist, my sensual D Litt, he thought, and smiled.

His mistress, merry and flushed, opened the door.

‘Guy! Good heavens!’ she said. ‘It isn’t Tuesday is it?’

‘Jesus Christ, Sandy,’ he said, irritably. ‘I’m not a dental appointment. And it’s Monday.’

‘Well, what do you want to do? I’ve a kitchen full of summer students – my American ladies. We’ve just opened a few bottles.’

‘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.’