The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [123]
“It is a bit surprising, I have to admit. She’s not usually open to … well, you know, foreigners. Although you certainly don’t sound French.”
Norval nodded. “I was thinking of giving her something. I mean, besides money for the room. Does she have any hobbies? Does she read?”
Teresa stubbed her cigarette out on the side of her bottle. “She used to read—about astronomy mostly. She had this telescope, this really cool telescope that Gally gave her years ago. She was absolutely mad about it, she could gaze at the sky for hours. It was her prize possession—until one day she smashed it to pieces.”
The film was being shot in London, with rehearsals taking place in a church basement in Harlesden. Owing to production delays and winter rain it took longer than expected: Norval was gone for over four months. At first he had no intention of returning to the house, but as the days turned over he found he couldn’t get either Mrs. Pettybone or Teresa out of his mind. After his first month away, he sent Mrs. Pettybone a postal order and a present; after his second, he sent Teresa a letter, with x’s at the end, and instructions regarding the present. Remembering a parting kiss with parted lips, he also posted these lines from Rimbaud:
Fists in torn pockets I departed.
And I listened, sitting by the road
In soft September, where the dewdrops
Were strong wine on my forehead;
And in fantastical shadows rhyming,
I plucked like lyres the laces
Of my ruined boots,
One foot against my heart.
Have I lost my mind? Norval wondered, the moment the letter dropped into the box. He put his fingers into the slot, peered in. Should I try to retrieve it?
Two weeks later he received a response, slipped under his door at the Staunton Hotel in Bloomsbury. It was a thin blue envelope with a postcard inside. On the front was a black-and-white photograph of the church in Hucknall, in whose cemetery they had drunk a bottle of wine and kissed for the first time. On the back of the card, in the address square, was one line: Come back, you madman. On the message side was a pastel sketch of Norval himself, in Byronic attitude:
On the last day of shooting Norval bolted from the set to catch an express train to Nottingham. He decided to pass on the wrap party, and on interesting propositions from two actresses and a make-up artist. Measured by watch hands, the train journey was brief, but to Norval it felt like a ride on the Trans-Siberian. After switching to the Robin Hood Line, he found himself sprinting across a muddy field by a cow pond, in twilight rain. “I’ve lost my mind,” he concluded, not unhappily. He was gasping like a marathoner as he approached Mrs. Pettybone’s B & B.
It was unrecognisable. An unfamiliar van sat in the driveway; the garden had grown wild; drainpipes and gutters were clogged. Inside, dust accumulated, dishes were unwashed, odours unchecked. Mrs. Pettybone no longer rushed about, no longer wore a jogging suit, no longer rose at dawn. The gong was gone. During the day she could be found lounging on a daybed, reading or singing or raving about Ganymede or Maxwell Montes or the Bay of Rainbows; at night she mysteriously disappeared, climbing up the creaking back stairway, sitting atop the unmotivated steps for hours.
To all appearances, Mrs. Pettybone was finally over the edge, finally bereft of her scant remaining faculties. Or perhaps, thought the neighbours, she’d given up the war on germs because her daughter had died. But the neighbours were wrong: about the war and about Teresa too.
While Norval was away in London, on a day when Mrs. Pettybone did her errands in town, Galahad Santlal arrived at her house for the first time in twenty-two years—with putty knife, lead hammer, glass pliers, glazing sprigs, beam compass, glass cutter. With Teresa supervising from below, Gally climbed the unmotivated steps, cut a round hole in the ceiling and installed a pivoting skylight. As well as a chair, a tripod supporting Norval’s gift, and a shelf for two books