The Memory Palace. Gill Alderman
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GILL ALDERMAN
The Memory Palace
‘Each page a promise that all shall be well’
Harper Voyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1996
Copyright © Gill Alderman 1996
Gill Alderman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006497738
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008226947
Version: 2016-12-22
For HbJ
The history and geography in this novel are (mainly) fiction.
The quotations which head the four sections of the book are from The Haunter by Thomas Hardy; A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman; Proverbs of Hell by William Blake and The Crusader Returns From Captivity by G. K. Chesterton. The quotation on the title page is from Message Home by Seán Dunne and the verse on page 347 after For A Gentlewoman, by Humfrey Giffard (fl. 1580).
CONTENTS
Part Two: Excursions in Purgatory
How shall I let him know
That whither his fancy sets him wandering
I, too, alertly go?
THOMAS HARDY
His hands ached badly, as they often did at the end of a long keyboard session. He flexed his fingers while he looked out, beyond the screen, into the twilit garden of the old rectory. It was a little cooler; he thought the rosebushes trembled slightly. There might be a breeze, one zephyr only: just a breath of air to end the stifling day. The lawns merged with churchyard and field and, in Humfrey’s Close, the Norman castle mound looked bigger than it was, worn down by nine hundred years of weather, rabbits and grazing sheep. A mile or so away, Karemarn’s dark slopes were beginning to merge with the night sky.
The sun had set. The only light in the room came from the screen of the computer before the window, a luminescent shield which occulted the world outside as effectively as the steep hill hid the rising moon. It was covered with words, the conclusion of his newest novel and – as necessary an adjunct to his storytelling as the hallowed and familiar phrase ‘Once upon a time’ – with his authorial adieu to the reader, that essential phrase with which he always signed off at the finish of the task: ‘THE END’. Then, his last words, his hand upon the creation: ‘Guy Kester Parados, The Old Rectory, Maidford Halse, June 24th 1990’.
He stretched, reaching high, yawned wide. A grisaille light as glamorous as that cast by his mind-mirroring screen filled the garden and the small field beyond it. It was time to be gone. He clicked the mouse under his right hand and saw his work vanish into the machine. He would leave it now, to settle and sift out of his mind; when he returned after the break, he would come to it refreshed. Then, one or two readings, a little tweaking (especially of the unsatisfactory last chapter) and a punctuation check should suffice and he could be rid of it for ever, in the future seeing it only as an entity given public birth by others, separate from him, one more title on the shelf – He made a copy and, reaching up, hid the floppy disk in the customary place in the cracked mullion.
‘You may now switch off safely.’ He read the prompt and, reaching for the switch, said ‘I shall, I shall.’ It had been a long haul, this one, through the fifteenth. The landscape of the novels was so familiar that he no longer had to consciously invent it, only travel the road with his chosen company, as used to his fictional country of Malthassa as to the hedged and crop-marked fields of the rural Midlands outside his study window. It was an old picture, this place outside the house; he no longer needed to look at it to remember it, but only inwards, into his mind, where those more perilous places, the dangerous rocks, the wild steppes and untameable floods he had created called him persistently.
If I had gone in for the Church, he thought, would it have made me any happier? Would that honest life have felt more just, more true, than this of spinning the thread, weaving the cloth, cutting and stitching the garment of the storyteller? Would Helen have avoided me, or seen me as a greater challenge? I was a pushover for her after all, most eager to co-operate.
Maybe Dominic will prove to be my truest