Free In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame Page B

George and I have this feeling that time has cheated us.
    Instantly she seemed to regret what she was saying, at least to regret her expression of her feeling.
    She was about to say something further, then she sighed and said, vaguely, —You know.
    In the words she uttered, you know , she put, because she could not bear to say it, a feeling of nothingness.
    I did know.
    To have lived so long with time and to find, when one thought one had all the time in the world , that time had deserted, disappeared.
    I knew she did not mean to convey that time was short, that now they had retired they found themselves feeling their age and thinking of death and perhaps preparing for it and realising that their time on earth alive was almost finished. She meant that time had abandoned them, had been unfaithful in its myth which had given them faithful attendance as far as they could remember. There was no time now. Like a vanished occupant of a favourite chair, or room or seat in the sun, it left an emptiness which itself had become the intolerable if contradictory presence of nothingness. The lie had discovered them before they discovered the lie.
    —You do know, don’t you?
    I told her, yes, I did know.
    —And will you come to live in the apartment? You can catch the bus each day to the Memorial Room – I believe that a condition of the Fellowship is that you work in the room once or twice a week.
    —Yes. But I have somewhere to stay, thank you. I’ve moved to the Foster’s small villa.
    They were angry, as I had sensed that the Watercresses, the Markhams, had been angry.
    —Everyone is offering me a place to live, I said.
    —The others too? The Watercresses, the Markhams?
    —Yes.
    Liz frowned.
    —Angela will be livid, George said. Then he added, —Old, retired.

11
    The library performed a similar function to the English church – it gathered together the exiles who had left England partly because they did not wish to be gathered together but who had changed their mind once they had arrived on the Côte d’Azur, settled in their retirement homes or apartments, redecorated and furnished the interior, cleaned up and planted the garden, and then sitting back to enjoy the arrival of the long-anticipated time for living, found that it was late, or it had been and gone, or it was only a dream. Instead, they saw the empty white winter sky, the bare hostile mountains, Italian and French, and another country’s ocean, and olive trees, palm trees, orchards lit with oranges and lemons, all of which they had known as visitors before they chose their place of retirement, and which they’d looked forward to seeing daily and possessing. Gradually they became aware of the changed relationship, of the intrusions of intimacy which adoption, of a person or a place, forced upon the new parent, of responsibilities and shames such as members of a family feel, of frustrations and longings for release that are part of the feeling towards a native land. And this, with no rescue or assistance from the benevolent promised time.
    It was at that stage the exiles began going to the church and the library and the British Association. They began ‘taking tea’ at four each day in one another’s homes. They drew apart from the French community and became a tolerated eccentric ‘little England’. No one should have been startled, on entering the English library between the hours of nine and eleven on Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday morning, to find a collection of elderly men and women fumbling their way through book titles on dimly lit shelves ( The Egyptian Campaign , Italian Journey , The Great Generals and so on), while talking to one another in Oxford accents, dropping names and sentences like, ‘When I was at Magdalen’, ‘I knew him at Cambridge’, ‘The Vicar says…’, nor alarmed to hear an elderly man or woman exclaim, ‘Give me something light, a detective novel’ (from the rows and rows of much-read paperback crime fiction),