Gill Alderman - The Memory Palace

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PART ONE

JOURNEY SOUTH

How shall I let him know

That whither his fancy sets him wandering

I, too, alertly go?

THOMAS HARDY

His hands ached badly, as they often did at the end of a long keyboard session. He flexed his fingers while he looked out, beyond the screen, into the twilit garden of the old rectory. It was a little cooler; he thought the rosebushes trembled slightly. There might be a breeze, one zephyr only: just a breath of air to end the stifling day. The lawns merged with churchyard and field and, in Humfrey’s Close, the Norman castle mound looked bigger than it was, worn down by nine hundred years of weather, rabbits and grazing sheep. A mile or so away, Karemarn’s dark slopes were beginning to merge with the night sky.

The sun had set. The only light in the room came from the screen of the computer before the window, a luminescent shield which occulted the world outside as effectively as the steep hill hid the rising moon. It was covered with words, the conclusion of his newest novel and – as necessary an adjunct to his storytelling as the hallowed and familiar phrase ‘Once upon a time’ – with his authorial adieu to the reader, that essential phrase with which he always signed off at the finish of the task: ‘THE END’. Then, his last words, his hand upon the creation: ‘Guy Kester Parados, The Old Rectory, Maidford Halse, June 24th 1990’.

He stretched, reaching high, yawned wide. A grisaille light as glamorous as that cast by his mind-mirroring screen filled the garden and the small field beyond it. It was time to be gone. He clicked the mouse under his right hand and saw his work vanish into the machine. He would leave it now, to settle and sift out of his mind; when he returned after the break, he would come to it refreshed. Then, one or two readings, a little tweaking (especially of the unsatisfactory last chapter) and a punctuation check should suffice and he could be rid of it for ever, in the future seeing it only as an entity given public birth by others, separate from him, one more title on the shelf – He made a copy and, reaching up, hid the floppy disk in the customary place in the cracked mullion.

‘You may now switch off safely.’ He read the prompt and, reaching for the switch, said ‘I shall, I shall.’ It had been a long haul, this one, through the fifteenth. The landscape of the novels was so familiar that he no longer had to consciously invent it, only travel the road with his chosen company, as used to his fictional country of Malthassa as to the hedged and crop-marked fields of the rural Midlands outside his study window. It was an old picture, this place outside the house; he no longer needed to look at it to remember it, but only inwards, into his mind, where those more perilous places, the dangerous rocks, the wild steppes and untameable floods he had created called him persistently.

If I had gone in for the Church, he thought, would it have made me any happier? Would that honest life have felt more just, more true, than this of spinning the thread, weaving the cloth, cutting and stitching the garment of the storyteller? Would Helen have avoided me, or seen me as a greater challenge? I was a pushover for her after all, most eager to co-operate.

Maybe Dominic will prove to be my truest throw. I’d better take his card with me, and the letter.

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.