In the Memorial Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

side in a gracious old building.
    —Yes. Grace has written ten poems too, you know, and published two books. When they get settled there’ll be no stopping them.
    —I suppose not, I said.

    The next morning I called in to see the Watercresses on my way to the bank (there’d been some problem with the arrival of my scholarship money) and I found the working in action. I hesitated to interrupt. Connie and Max had rented for a month a large apartment with all facilities including hot water and a bath, a bedroom and a living room and kitchen. Grace and Michael, next door, had one large room and all facilities. This morning all were seated around the large oval table in the big sitting-room. Each had a large white sheet of paper, and in the centre of the table were two boxes of coloured crayons. All four were busily drawing.
    I observed them. Max, in his late seventies, was of rather stout build, with rosy face and military moustache. When he walked his bearing was military, and his accent was English. I’d been told (to my anticipatory horror) that he’d had an operation on his eyes and wore glasses that were a kind of magnifying lens, so that when one looked at his eyes one saw huge brown dog-like orbs that in their magnification revealed the slightest wave of emotion. I had a sense of unreality thinking of him with his repaired eyes and I with my failing sight and sometimes getting myself into the frame of mind where he and I were brothers, or father and son, that anyway we shared an unusual condition and therefore should have special insight into each other. I saw in him only his love for and pride in his son. When he looked at Michael, if you observed closely, you could see the magnified brown eyes quivering with love; they would grow moist with their love and pride.
    As far as Max was concerned Michael was the genius, the writer – well, the talented young man who could be (it was not yet the time in his life when one said ‘could have been’) a writer, or a painter (‘he’s always been good at drawing and painting’) or a composer and musician (‘he has perfect pitch, he nearly took a music degree, he has composed hundreds of songs and pieces of music’). Michael’s talents were indeed impressive and every time I was with his parents I was made conscious of them.
    I watched Connie, bent over her sheet of paper, drawing with a large blue crayon, absorbed in her work. Her face was permanently pale with the kind of makeup which suppresses colour in the cheeks. Her cheekbones were high and rather narrowed her small blue eyes. She too was stockily built and dressed usually in a tweed costume such as New Zealand women wear to the horse races at Addington and Avondale, and her evening wear to the receptions and dinners for the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow was usually a dress of dark shimmering material, and she carried a small spangled evening bag. Her hands, grasping the crayon, were plump and floury. When she spoke, French or English, she spoke slowly, almost mechanically, with a swaying motion of her body as if she had within her some instrument for winding her words, in sentence-containers, up from a great depth where they had fallen or been banished; sometimes one felt as if they were extracted with difficulty, as if she herself had gone away down into the rock to hack them out and shake them clean – a long slow process which made her listeners impatient: usually Max or Michael took over the telling of a long story when the words to fit it appeared to be growing scarce.
    Grace, as one who had stolen the beloved son, knew her privileges; retelling Connie’s stories was not one of them. Grace, in this family setting, was the tolerated outsider whose slightest false move would change her to the enemy; the seeds of enmity had been planted with her arrival as Michael’s unofficial wife but the rain- and sun-making forces necessary for their growth had been imprisoned within the seasonless weatherless world of the