Free In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame Page A

had busy, narrow arms, and elbows that jerked about like angled branches in a fierce wind. She had been described to me as a ‘dynamo’.
    He was almost bald. His face was flushed, his eyes a little confused and his mouth seemingly without any power, which made his speech unintelligible, as I have described. Liz understood what he said and understood that his listeners were confused, therefore she was inclined to explain his longer speeches.
    After a while, instead of the usual ‘Angela will be livid’, I was able to discern the words ‘old’ and ‘retired’.
    When the teacups had been set out (those flower-bordered craters) on their saucers (truly soucoupes volantes !) and filled with clay and hot water which was stirred with a spoon (a silver garden implement), and I had admired the house and the view, and pointed to one or two books on the bookshelf (a cliff with ordered crevices neatly filled with brown gold and red bricks which opened and were leaved with rectangular white sheets, deux place , double sheets, starched and stained where some child or children had evidently played a curious game of catching flies and other small insects, breaking off their legs and antennae, and arranging them in rows upon the bedsheets, then pressing them, one sheet upon the other, so that they emerged in orderly rows, resembling a cipher), and we had begun to drink our tea, Liz and George, working together to get the highest degree of intelligibility, explained that they wondered if they had made a mistake in coming to live on a mountainside at their time of life. Physical ills were besetting them. The city was so far away; everything was beginning to seem out of reach. It depressed George. Liz made sure that she traced the source of depression to George. She felt more optimistic.
    —Angela will be livid, George said. —Old, retired.
    Liz agreed.
    —It’s not easy to come out from England and retire here, giving up your pension, living in a foreign land.
    —Angela will be livid.
    —Yes, and on a mountain-side with so far to go for supplies and the winters getting colder and the shortage of petrol. And the ills of approaching age.
    Clearly both felt they had made a mistake but they were powerless to change it, almost as if they had given birth to their mistake and now it had become a separate being which they could not touch or influence; all they could do was claim ownership of it.
    One enjoyment, however, was the English library where George and Liz acted as voluntary librarians when the library was open three times a week in an anteroom of the English church.
    —Angela will be livid. Old, retired.
    —Yes, it’s a great satisfaction, Liz interpreted.
    Then she leaned towards me, like a doll-tower with her garden face and decaying olive-tree hair.
    —What about you? You know I’m Head of the Welcoming Committee?
    —Yes, you met me at the station.
    —Did I? So I did. So I did. It seems so long ago. Are you settling down? Working?
    —More or less.
    —You will have seen that apartment, quite self-contained, that we have on the second floor? We never go up there. We don’t care for the stairs. Living on a mountain-side is enough climbing for us. You would be welcome to live in it, Harry. Very welcome. Now that George can’t always get into town, it would be company for him to have someone living upstairs. We’d love to have you. I think we met Rose Hurndell once when we were here years ago. A pretty little thing.
    —I thought she was quite tall.
    —She wasn’t, was she, George? Wasn’t Rose Hurndell thin and quite small?
    —Angela will be livid, George said, helping himself to a triangular bandage of bread packed with sardines.
    —I must be thinking of someone else. George says she was quite tall. One didn’t know, then, that she would be so famous. She was living with Louise Markham, a bit of an Amazon, don’t you think?
    — Her time is her own , I said slyly.
    —Time?
    Liz suddenly became agitated.
    —Both