The Memory Palace

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.

At the ferryport gate the usual cluster of hitch-hikers waited. Etta stopped her car beside a pale-faced girl whose choker of black velvet only emphasised her pallor. She looked sick and bewildered.

‘Are you all right?’

‘It’s just the sea: I travel better by air.’

‘Want a lift?’

‘Paris? The AI?’

‘I’m going to Reims, but I can drop you near Cambrai. There’s an intersection: you ought to get a lift south there.’

‘OK.’

The girl got into the car. She was very slim and very young, Etta noticed; but clearly an experienced traveller. Etta had started travelling in such a way herself, made no judgements and asked no questions. They talked about holidays and clothes.

Guy was relieved to be back in the Audi. While he waited in the queue, he re-read Dominic’s letter to verify his destination: ‘Coeurville, Burgundy’, that was all. When he reached the town – or village – he would have to ask. He hoped it was a small place.