The Memory Artists
“Unmotivated steps.”
“ … and then I … I’m sorry?”
“They’re called unmotivated steps—they lead nowhere. My grandfather liked them for some reason, liked the irrationality of it all. So do I, for that matter.”
The hall light began to flash on and off. “Teresa?” a high voice clucked from below. Mrs. Pettybone’s. “Are you all right, dear? Is that boy violating you? He’s from the theatre!”
“I’m fine, Mother!”
“And he’s French!”
“You can go back to sleep, Mother!” To Norval, sotto voce, she said, “We’d better talk in here. Can I offer you a drink?” She smelled the beer on his breath. “A coffee?”
Norval glanced at the neckline of her shirt, which had slipped to reveal the lace of a white bra. “Well, yes, fine …”
“It’s just that … I haven’t talked to anyone in a while, apart from my mother. And doctor. I’m sort of in quarantine.”
“You’re in quarantine? For …?”
“You name it, it’s a long list. I think I managed to thoroughly scare my doctor—he said if I was a building I’d be condemned.”
“That’s … some bedside manner.”
“He probably thought I was going to disintegrate right there in his office. But enough of that, I must sound like some doddering hypo chondriac. Come.”
Ignoring an amber light inside him, and the strictures of Mrs. Pettybone, Norval entered Teresa’s bedroom. It was a sty, looking and smelling of sickness, a tornado aftermath of laundry and magazines and empty mugs and medicine bottles and half-filled crossword puzzles and pages ripped from sketch books and bordelloish antiques like brass oil lamps and pewter candle snuffers … A series of candles illuminated two De Chiricos on the wall— deserted piazzas, illogical shadows, dark arcades, hidden danger—as well as paintings of her own showing shuttered summerhouses, neglected parks, marble steps overrun with weeds, paths strewn with dead leaves. Two small charcoal drawings lay on the floor: one of her mother, decades younger, and one of herself, with long wavy tresses to the waist.
After closely examining the latter, Norval sat down in a teetering wicker chair. Teresa plugged in a kettle. Under the flickering candlelight he got a better look at her: early twenties, fair and frail, sickly pale, eyes so preternaturally blue as to be from another species or universe. It was while looking into these eyes that Norval had a shocking premonition: her future, however short, would be entwined with his.
“How in God’s name did you end up here?” Teresa asked with a faint smile. She had full, naturally crimson lips and teeth as white as toothpaste. “We haven’t had guests for ages.”
“Gally gave me the address.”
“Gally Santlal? Are you serious? And you told my mother?”
“It’s the only reason she opened the door.” Norval rooted around in his pockets and pulled out an empty cigarette pack. “Do you smoke, by any chance?”
“The doctor asked me the same question. I said no and he said, ‘Well, you might as well.’” Teresa took two cigarettes out of a jar and tapped them on the back of her hand. One match lit both. “So how is Gally these days? What’s he up to?”
Norval shrugged. “I don’t know that much about him. He’s a glazier … as I guess you know.” He took the offered cigarette, drew on it as though it were his last. “He’d just finished replacing windows in some church. Which were smashed or stolen. In Hucknall? Let’s see … oh, his wife died, which is why he could join me for—”
“His wife died? You’re kidding. I didn’t know that. Recently?”
“No idea. But he didn’t seem all that shaken.”
Teresa poured tepid water into a mug, emptied a packet of instant coffee into it. “So how … where did you meet him?”
“Newstead Abbey.” Norval took a sip of the coffee and winced. “At the restaurant, I forget what it’s called. The one with the doilies and vomitgreen rug and squawking peacocks outside …”
Teresa laughed. “The Buttery.”
“Where I was abysmally drunk by three in the afternoon, much more than now, and semi-suicidal amidst the peacocks. Did I mention the peacocks?”
“Semi-suicidal?”
“I’m an actor, in a manner of speaking. A very loose manner. I was supposed to be in a play that was cancelled.”
“In Nottingham? At the Playhouse? Theatre Royal?”
“No, at a library that someone burned down a few days before we arrived. Wish they’d told us. Wish they’d paid us.”
Teresa laughed again, showing her beautiful white teeth. “I’m sorry, I suppose it’s not very funny. Which play were you doing?”
“Tartuffe.”
“Molière?”
Norval nodded. “In French too—a harebrained government project that wouldn’t have drawn more than four people, including the ushers and janitor. Anyway, as I’m having a …” Here Norval reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a cardboard beer mat. “… a ‘Worthington Creamflow Bitter,’ Gally sticks his head through the window and scares the living shit out of me.”
Teresa grinned. “Why would he do that? Oh, I see, he was replacing it.”
“There was no glass in the window but I hadn’t even noticed. So we start chatting. And then he offers me another …” Norval’s hands patted all pockets.
“Worthington Creamflow Bitter,” said Teresa.
“Correct. Anyway, as he leaves he gives me your mom’s address. Along with his card and the name of a film company he used to work for. Where, by some miracle, I got a job today.” Norval held up his script. “Well, not a miracle exactly. The guy who originally got the part is now at Queen’s.”
“The hospital?”
“After doing some very strong drugs, he did a perfect jackknife into an empty swimming pool.”
Teresa winced, then crawled back into bed with her boots on. “Congratulations,” she said before washing down a handful of pills with liquid from an amber bottle. “I guess.” Awkward seconds ticked by. Norval sipped his Maxwell House, glanced at her hair. Was it razed in the name of fashion, he wondered, or because of something more sinister? He began leafing through his script. Scarlet and black wounds burst on the proud flesh. Life’s own colours darken, dance and divide …
“Who is Gally exactly?” he asked suddenly. “I mean, what’s his connection with your mom?”
Teresa took a long haul on her cigarette. “He wanted to marry her— until, that is, he found out she was pregnant. With me. Then he changed his mind. At least that’s Mom’s version. I have another.”
“Which is?”
“Well, Gally is … Trinidadian, East Asian. At the time, for my mother— and her family in particular—that was a problem. Anyway, they haven’t spoken to each other since his own wedding day over twenty years ago. My mom’s never gotten over it—it’s been like a canker, eating away at her daily.”
“Because she was in love with him?”
Teresa nodded, tapped ash into a mug filled with cigarettes. “She was seeing two men at the time—Gally and my dad—but she loved only one. Gally. But my dad was a persuasive character, shall we say, and somehow made love to her without … you know, protection. She’s never gotten over the shame or guilt. So after divorcing my dad she turned the place into a B & B. And she’s been cleaning ever since—spraying, airing things out, condomising the place.”
Norval tried to smile but no smile came, a strange sadness raining down on him. He looked around the squalorous room. “I take it she’s not allowed in here.”
Teresa laughed. “I rebelled long ago. But she’s doing it—the war on germs, I mean—for my sake too. I’ve been sick for a long time. It’s funny, it’s like the boy who cried wolf. When I was young she always insisted I was sick, taking me to the doctor’s and to hospitals when nothing was wrong with me. And now … Anyway, you must think she’s mad as a hatter,53 not to mention a redneck, but she’s all right, really. Generous, thoughtful, do anything for me.”
&
nbsp; “She’s done a lot for me too, I don’t quite know why.”
“It is a bit surprising, I have to admit. She’s not usually open to … well, you know, foreigners. Although you certainly don’t sound French.”
Norval nodded. “I was thinking of giving her something. I mean, besides money for the room. Does she have any hobbies? Does she read?”
Teresa stubbed her cigarette out on the side of her bottle. “She used to read—about astronomy mostly. She had this telescope, this really cool telescope that Gally gave her years ago. She was absolutely mad about it, she could gaze at the sky for hours. It was her prize possession—until one day she smashed it to pieces.”
The film was being shot in London, with rehearsals taking place in a church basement in Harlesden. Owing to production delays and winter rain it took longer than expected: Norval was gone for over four months. At first he had no intention of returning to the house, but as the days turned over he found he couldn’t get either Mrs. Pettybone or Teresa out of his mind. After his first month away, he sent Mrs. Pettybone a postal order and a present; after his second, he sent Teresa a letter, with x’s at the end, and instructions regarding the present. Remembering a parting kiss with parted lips, he also posted these lines from Rimbaud:
Fists in torn pockets I departed.
And I listened, sitting by the road
In soft September, where the dewdrops
Were strong wine on my forehead;
And in fantastical shadows rhyming,
I plucked like lyres the laces
Of my ruined boots,
One foot against my heart.
Have I lost my mind? Norval wondered, the moment the letter dropped into the box. He put his fingers into the slot, peered in. Should I try to retrieve it?
Two weeks later he received a response, slipped under his door at the Staunton Hotel in Bloomsbury. It was a thin blue envelope with a postcard inside. On the front was a black-and-white photograph of the church in Hucknall, in whose cemetery they had drunk a bottle of wine and kissed for the first time. On the back of the card, in the address square, was one line: Come back, you madman. On the message side was a pastel sketch of Norval himself, in Byronic attitude:
On the last day of shooting Norval bolted from the set to catch an express train to Nottingham. He decided to pass on the wrap party, and on interesting propositions from two actresses and a make-up artist. Measured by watch hands, the train journey was brief, but to Norval it felt like a ride on the Trans-Siberian. After switching to the Robin Hood Line, he found himself sprinting across a muddy field by a cow pond, in twilight rain. “I’ve lost my mind,” he concluded, not unhappily. He was gasping like a marathoner as he approached Mrs. Pettybone’s B & B.
It was unrecognisable. An unfamiliar van sat in the driveway; the garden had grown wild; drainpipes and gutters were clogged. Inside, dust accumulated, dishes were unwashed, odours unchecked. Mrs. Pettybone no longer rushed about, no longer wore a jogging suit, no longer rose at dawn. The gong was gone. During the day she could be found lounging on a daybed, reading or singing or raving about Ganymede or Maxwell Montes or the Bay of Rainbows; at night she mysteriously disappeared, climbing up the creaking back stairway, sitting atop the unmotivated steps for hours.
To all appearances, Mrs. Pettybone was finally over the edge, finally bereft of her scant remaining faculties. Or perhaps, thought the neighbours, she’d given up the war on germs because her daughter had died. But the neighbours were wrong: about the war and about Teresa too.
While Norval was away in London, on a day when Mrs. Pettybone did her errands in town, Galahad Santlal arrived at her house for the first time in twenty-two years—with putty knife, lead hammer, glass pliers, glazing sprigs, beam compass, glass cutter. With Teresa supervising from below, Gally climbed the unmotivated steps, cut a round hole in the ceiling and installed a pivoting skylight. As well as a chair, a tripod supporting Norval’s gift, and a shelf for two books on the galaxies, from his own collection. He then waited for Mrs. Pettybone’s return.
Minutes ticked by as Noel fidgeted and Norval drank. “OK, so don’t tell me the story,” said Noel. “Whatever happened, I’m sure you behaved like a bastard—an unromantic, unsentimental, unthoughtful bastard.”
Norval’s head was bowed, uncharacteristically. He was on to his fourth double Irish. “Dead on.”
“Were you in love with Terry? Did she leave you? Is that why you were in love with her? Because nobody else has ever dumped you, ever broken your heart?”
Norval swirled the dregs of his Connemara. “I am not my father. I decamped, point final. I thought about what I was doing, then boarded the first plane to Canada.”
“But why? I mean if you—”
“I was at an age—not that I’ve outgrown it—when I couldn’t deal with being in … never mind.”
“Being in what? In love? Is that what you were going to say?”
“It’s like measles—I had it once and now I’m immune.”
I knew it! Noel exclaimed, to himself. “But is it … too late? Can’t you go back and—”
“It’s too late.”
“Why? Is she married? Did she die? Tell me the story.”
“No.” He glared at Noel with drunken hostility. “You’ll never hear it.” He rose from the table unsteadily. From his back pocket he extracted a crumpled note of massive denomination and flung it on the table. “At least not from me.”
Norval stayed two months at Mrs. Pettybone’s B & B. The proprietor assigned him the finest room in the house, which happened to be across the hall from her daughter’s. Gally had also been assigned a room, on the ground floor, next to Mrs. Pettybone. But Gally stayed longer than Norval; in fact, he never left. A week after installing the skylight and telescope he proposed to Mrs. Pettybone, for the second time in twenty-two years, and this time was accepted. The wedding was to be held in the spring, a civil wedding at The Orangery at Newstead Abbey.
A double wedding? thought Norval. The idea was so preposterous, so antithetical to everything that he—the very symbol of bachelorhood— believed in that he suggested it to Teresa. It had the right touch of the absurd, the anachronistic, the harebrained. She hasn’t long to live, a few years maybe (and who knows how long I’ve got?), so why not seize the Christly day, do something shockingly, uncharacteristically unselfish? But that’s not even the right word, he thought. It is selfish—I want to spend every last second with her. And maybe they’ll find a cure …
Teresa, after realising Norval wasn’t kidding about the proposal, said no. “Don’t be mad. It’s just … not done anymore.”
“Must I arrange it with your mother? A forced union? And what if you’re pregnant? Gally will come after me with a shotgun. Or putty knife.”
Teresa laughed. “A marriage would make my mother happy, deliriously happy. But a double wedding? Not in a million years. I wouldn’t want to steal her thunder, and I don’t want to deal with old relatives and friends. But … if you’re absolutely sure about this, Norval, if you’re not doing it out of some Florence Nightingale motive or to obtain a Boy Scout badge, then I will elope. Anywhere you like, any time.”
For Norval, it was the first time he’d been happy since the age of nine. He was in his first relationship that lasted more than a week, a place he never thought he’d be. He could scarcely believe what was happening— he was falling in love, for Christ’s sake, something he thought was impossible, an emotional state he had ridiculed his entire life. But that was pre-Teresa ...
They arranged to marry in London, in Camden, partly because Norval had to be there to reshoot the ending of Rimbaud in London. The two left on the train together but Teresa, who had been feeling ill all morning, complained of double vision. Norval had noticed that one of her eyes wandered, and that she seemed to be tilting her head to the right. So she got off the train to see her doctor in Nottingham, insisting that Norval ride on without her. They would meet up the next day, she promised, on the steps of the Camden To
wn Hall.
The following day, an hour before they were scheduled to meet, Norval was there waiting, worried, his back against the wall of the building, sheltered from the pouring rain. He waited two hours, checking his watch every five minutes, peering out from behind a rain-battered column. I had a feeling she wouldn’t come. How could I think she would come? She’s changed her mind, can’t go through with it. Or is there someone else? Her ex? Craig Slandon, beer-guzzling imbecile, aged twenty-one? Another hour passed, maybe more, before he phoned Mrs. Pettybone’s B & B. No, she wasn’t there. We thought she was with you in London. Oh dear.
Norval took the first express train north, to Nottingham, then a taxi to Queen’s Hospital. Yes, a receptionist informed him, Teresa spent the night here, but went home this morning … He flew out the door to hail another cab. At the train station, a tree down at Newstead kept him waiting for another murderous hour. After standing the entire way, chain-smoking between carriages, he jumped off the moving train at Hucknall, and ran with bursting lungs through fields of decaying vegetation and stagnant pools of water, to Mrs. Pettybone’s B & B.
Teresa was not there. Norval raced up and down steps, opened up doors and closets of rooms that hadn’t been used in years, madly, rampageously, even climbing up to the attics. “Teresa!” he shouted repeatedly. “Terry!” The three of them—Mrs. Pettybone, Gally and Norval— scoured her bedroom for a sign, a farewell message, a suicide note. Nothing. She had vanished and clearly did not want to be found.54
Chapter 19
Norval & Company
Liszt’s Symphonic Poem No. 2 was starting as Noel placed a fake log on the fire. Lounging in Mr. Burun’s La-Z-Boy, his right cheek and sandwashed Nepalese silk shirt uncharacteristically smudged with black, Norval observed his new environment while cracking nuts and inhaling Armagnac.
“Fish rule in effect,” said Norval.
“Fish rule?”
“An old Danish proverb: ‘Fish, like guests, begin to stink after three days.’ On second thought, I’ll get a hotel.” In his head Norval began to rewind the evening, scarcely able to believe he was sitting where he was. He had taken a taxi home from the bar less than an hour before, seen something there that sobered him up at once, took another cab to Noel’s. Where for the first time in his life he was admitted—by Mrs. Burun.