Free In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame

people which had become two chimneys would not become, with each deterioration of sight, completely different yet faithfully observed objects? Or if I found myself an optician who provided me with glasses of increasing power, even beyond the power of binoculars, even microscopic power, and I described what I saw ‘with my own eyes’, what then would the two chimneys become – a moving mass of molecules, a city with a population of stony particles, furiously in motion? And if I looked out of my window then and wrote:
    From my window I see a city of stone, with a population of stone particles, a restless city forever in motion, a perpendicular city which fills the sky and is on fire at its centre, a controlled fire which emerges from the heights in hyphen-shaped smoke ribboned in the colours of the spectrum. There is no light as we know it in the city. It is a rainbow city, a city of the analysis of light.
    If I were to describe those two people and two chimneys thus, would you say I was being ‘truthful’?
    I thought of this problem as I travelled in the bus to Sainte-Agnès. My three thousand words without adjectives, without judgment, feeling, thinking, had almost been destroyed by Louise Markham’s time-image from within the convention of the myth.
    — Your time is your own .
    I was shocked, too, by the revelation, only that morning, that the couple who regularly admired the early view from the rooftop over the sea were nothing but two chimneys standing side by side.
    As the bus neared the side road halfway up the mountains where George and Liz Lee had instructed me to stop, I made up my mind , for my visit to them, to effect a mental change in the magnification of my vision – I’m not sure by how many centimetres, as if my eyes being binoculars I revolved their lenses to a point where, had I been again looking at the chimneys, I would not have seen them; instead, I would have seen the city of stone.
    Of course as soon as I descended from the bus I was overcome by a wave of sickness as the earth rushed its brown and green mass in my face. Hastily I reduced my magnification by half. I could only just walk now. I walked straight into George Lee who had been waiting at the bus stop.
    —Angela will be livid, he said.
    I apologised and said I’d had an attack of motion sickness.
    —Angela will be livid.
    —Yes, my eyes do trouble me at times.
    He was immense and ugly and his green flecked sports jacket lay in the corner of my eye like a public park which moved every time he moved his arm in walking.
    —Angela will be livid.
    He pointed to the small villa, something of the same construction as the Foster’s small house but, presented to me, it waved in my face like a patchwork quilt. Again I modified my magnification and I was pleased to find it was just comfortable enough for me to be received as a visitor without my alarming my hosts by making too many defensive gestures and confused movements in the face of the oncoming material world, which was not now in focus, so that it moved perpetually, although it had a tendency to aggressive looming.
    Liz Lee was waiting at the gate.
    —Angela will be livid, George said to her.
    —I’m glad it was on time, she said. —Come into the house.
    I admired the view.
    —How can houses be built here so high up the mountain? I asked.
    —Angela will be livid, George explained.
    —Yes, Liz continued. —By donkeys; everything was brought up that way, it was the only means of transport in those days.
    Her face was freshly made up like a garden, red lips, red cheeks and blue around her eyes; it was new makeup, but I could see that of yesterday, the day before, the month before, the year before, going back I suppose to the seven years when the skin is reported to be changed, like linen.
    Her gestures were eager, quick; her eyes bright; she was the middle-aged woman (she was fifty-six, I knew, and he was sixty-six), full of energy which fed her the illusion of being young. She