The Memory Palace. Gill Alderman

tee-shirt. A linen jacket was slung across his shoulder. He was about six feet tall, with thick grey hair, grey or blue eyes, and was clean-shaven. He might have been any age between forty and fifty, although he was two months short of his forty-ninth birthday. He had no peculiar distinguishing marks and kept himself fit by playing cricket and by taking long country walks; had, in any case, no hereditary tendency to fat.

      He experienced some difficulty with the number of objects he carried and resolved his problem by stacking the books and paper on the bar while he removed his RayBan sunglasses. He ordered a pint of Theakston’s Ale. When it was served, he took it to a table by a window and nursed his glass. After putting on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, which gave him a bookish air and made him look suddenly older, he opened the paper and read steadily, scanning the headlines first before turning back to peruse the articles in detail. Occasionally, he took a drink from his glass. He looked up once to stare at a blonde girl who sat at a nearby table, shook his head and read on; again looked up, at the mural on the opposite wall of ibis making piebald patterns against a landscape of fluid sky and marshland.

      ‘I began building the year the Sacred Ibis left the marsh. The foundations were soon dug and the footings laid. It was, after all, a small building. Many years passed before my spiritual troubles began, coinciding with the first extensions.

      ‘A new building for a new decade (my third). I was full of hope and my plans for the future excited me almost as much as the architectural drawings themselves; and far more than the white hands which, joined in prayer and resting on the sill of the confessional, were all I could see of Nemione Sophronia Baldwin, the youngest daughter of the reeve.

      ‘I had almost resolved to leave the Order. Strict observance of the Rule was very hard for a young man of twenty who could control neither himself nor his dreams, which were of an explicitly sexual nature. Yet Nemione’s self-sacrificing patience was an object lesson to me. Though I was tempted to abjure my vows and join myself to a battalion of the Brotherhood of the Green Wolf, I resolved to remain at Espmoss for two more years of study and then take what came. My courage was not of a high order. My disordered infancy followed by a childhood spent learning the Rule had made fear a close companion. I had often been whipped, at school by the proctor, Baptist Olburn, and in the cloister by Brother Fox, the Disciplinarian. The contemplation of freedom seemed sin enough.

      ‘We were free in all other respects. That I was allowed to begin this building (now such a remarkable edifice, as you see!) demonstrates how liberal was the Rule toward ambition. I had successfully completed my years as altar boy and novice: my building and the beautiful drawings of it were a kind of reward. The lodge (it was too small in those days to be called a palace) would contain both past and present, that much was obvious but, before I laid one stone, I had a tantalizing decision to make: should I now commence to erect the walls – they were to be of the finest white marble – or should I forsake the dark footings while I designed and planted the gardens?

      ‘The reeve’s daughter wore a gold chain about her slender neck. A small gold cross hung from it, one of the symbols of our faith. The four arms of the cross represent the points of the compass, north, south, east and west, and thus, our world, both material and spiritual. The device also represents the many cross-roads which we will find ourselves paused at, during life, while we ponder a vital decision: which direction to take now?

      ‘I had come to such a node myself or, if the metaphor may be laboured a little more, stood simultaneously at two. I had chosen to ignore the one; the dilemma of the other, smaller problem, lodge or garden, I solved in an ingenious way: I would attempt both tasks at once, devoting the cool mornings to the garden and the afternoons, which the sun made warm and pleasant, to the building. I determined to plant the equivalent of Nemione’s cross, our life, in my garden, and make it the basis of my design. This was difficult. Perhaps if I sited the building at the centre of the cross … but that precluded all additions. I might construct the cross-design in one’ quarter of the whole – such exquisite and nice considerations! The extensive gardens should both begin and complete my pleasure. The forbidden word again; it haunted me. A Green Wolf has every opportunity – is master of himself and of all the worldly delights I forbade myself. A Wolf would not linger in the cloister, hoping to catch a glimpse of Nemione. He would stride out to look for her.

      ‘I wanted to make nothing less than a shrine in which every object, animate or not, made spiritual sense. This is the reason for the incompleteness of the “wilderness” walks. They should be creations of artifice but I could not exclude such intruders as the wild rose and the coconut-scented gorse, nor these fine thistles and docks – and why waste genuine sports? I am even now too ambitious; and still too lazy to achieve all my ambitions.

      ‘Notwithstanding these outside imperfections, the interior of the building is, as you will see, in perfect order. We will climb the staircase (genuine porphyry – but mind the broken step!) and enter by the brazen doors which, yes, resemble more than a little the Gates of Paradise.’

      The old man took a key from the leather wallet he wore on his sword belt, fitted it to the lock and turned it.

      ‘I love to entertain my visitors (few enough) with such speeches,’ he said. ‘They are props to the ailing structures of my mind. As for the palace – here it is. I cannot escape from it. It has swallowed me whole, mind and body, hates and loves, possessions, beliefs, gold – that which glisters and is my fool’s reward and grail attained.

      ‘Since I am the one you never forget, it will be easier if I show you round. I’ll make you regret your memories of me! The grand tour I think, the one that takes in all the sights, leaves not a stone unturned. I do not have the resilience of some, not now. I lack the boldness of those outside.

      ‘Here we are. I’ll close the door – it lets in too much light, and also dirt, from outside. This is the chamber in which I was born. You must begin at the beginning, you see, if you are to make sense of my memory palace.’

      His guest craned his head forward as he tried to distinguish from the general gloom the heavy pieces of furniture with which the room was furnished.

      ‘Could we have a little light?’ he asked.

      ‘A glimmer!’ His guide struck a match and lit a small bull’s-eye lantern. But even with this it was hard to make anything out – the furniture seemed very big and also far away, the sort of dim and massive wooden giants he remembered from early childhood, of bottomless chests, cavernous wardrobes and tables as big as houses. He stepped gingerly forward.

      There was a bed. The covers were partly thrown back, white sheets, blue blankets and a patchwork quilt. He might just about manage to climb up. His teddy bear lay on the quilt; the smell was right – Castile soap and eau de Cologne, a faint overlay of sweat.

      ‘Mummy?’ he said and heard the dry laugh of the old man with the lantern.

      ‘Sorry, young man. I cannot preserve your memories.’

      ‘But this is my mother’s bed; where I was born, not you.’

      The old man laughed again.

      ‘That remains to be seen,’ he said. ‘The case as yet is unproven.’

      Guy read the book review in the centre pages of his newspaper. It spoke highly of a new biography of the Jesuit priest and scholar of Chinese, Matteo Ricci, who in the sixteenth century had invented a mnemonic system which used an imaginary building, such as a palace, and its furnishings as an aid to memorizing (for example) tenets of the Catholic faith. When published for his Chinese patron, Ricci’s method attracted many converts: the memory palace was open to guests, who used its courts and statuary to understand the new faith. Guy shivered. This kind of thing happened all too often: he devised a fictional description or idea and, a few days later, read of it in the newspaper or heard someone describe it on the radio.

      He re-read the article, his imagination caught and held by his parallel idea of a building full of memories, a cenotaph of reality as phantom-like as memory itself, and then, remembering he was on holiday, he turned to the sports pages. He read the breakdown of the cricket scores and forgot them immediately. The last lines of an old story came to mind: ‘“Damn you,’”