The Memory of Lost Senses (50 page)

For me, there’s also a dichotomy that belongs to this era: it’s the end of an old world order, and the start of a new, modern world. And it’s the era in which my grandparents were born; so there’s a link, a feeling of nearness and of being connected.

Q. Where did the idea for Cora’s story come from?

A. It began when I researched the history of my home. I wanted to know who had lived in the house before us. I discovered a few remarkable women, including one who—it transpired—had lived overseas, in Italy and France, and only returned to this country at the end of her life. I became intrigued by her and wanted to know more. But it took me a long time to piece together her life, because she had been married a number of times, changed names and moved about Europe so much. Over time, I realized she had not been entirely honest about her background, her parents, or her age, which made my research incredibly difficult, and made her all the more compelling! I wondered what had happened to her in her life, her early life; what had inspired the lies, why had she left England.

Q. You write very vividly about Rome and the life of the expat artist—how did you research this?

A. Well, I’m a graduate in History of Art, so I had an understanding of artists, particularly nineteenth-century artists, how they lived and worked. In order to learn about expatriate life in Rome at that time, I simply read everything and anything I could find, including old (and often out-of-print) biographies, memoirs and guidebooks. One book led me to another and then another, until, eventually, I felt I had a picture of Rome, then: how it looked, what took place and who had been there. I also studied street plans and maps of the city from before the Reunification, when Rome and the Papal States were unified with the rest of Italy, before so much of the medieval city was swept away. I collected old photographs and postcards, and I know the place, have visited it many times.

Q. There’s a strong blackmail theme running through the book. What inspired you to take a darker route with the story in
The Memory of Lost Senses
?

A. Firstly, I began writing
The Memory of Lost Senses
long before I had the idea for
The Last Summer
. And this novel had to have a dark edge to it because of its themes: duplicity, prejudice, child abuse, bigamy, lies, and reinvention. In fact, I wrote
The Last Summer
on a sabbatical from
The Memory of Lost Senses
, almost as an antidote to it.

I went through many emotions researching and writing this novel; I made assumptions and judgments, only to go back on them. Now I know that
The Memory of Lost Senses
is—more than anything else—a story about survival. Primarily, it is the story of a woman who had to flee her country, had to reinvent herself and spend a lifetime abroad, lying. As much as anything, the novel is an exploration of the nature of lying: Whether it is ever morally correct to lie in order to survive.

In the novel, Cora’s duplicity meant there had to be a degree of internal conflict. And because she returned to England—the country of her birth—for Jack, and because she wished to
put
the record straight for him, that internal conflict had to be released. She was someone who had reinvented herself and her own history, and I was fascinated by the possibility and the implications of someone from her past discovering the truth about her. How would she react? What would she do?

Q. Cecily and Cora become very close as the novel progresses. What did you find appealing about the contrast between youth and age in the context of their relationship?

A. Cecily is drawn to Cora because she has had a journey, something that Cecily—who has no experience of life, or love, and has never been anywhere—longs for. Cora is a woman at the end of her life, looking back upon it; Cecily is a young woman full of hope, projecting forward and trying to imagine how her life will be. The juxtaposition of age and youth, a woman who has traveled far and had to survive, and another who is on the cusp of life and yearning to be independent, is what cements their attraction to each other. But their perspectives are not so different: both women believe in love, and both make sacrifices for it.

Cora’s relationship with Cecily also allows us to see another dimension of her character. She is softer and often girlish with Cecily. The vagaries of memory go unchallenged, and she is allowed to recall only those events she wishes to recall. That is perhaps one of the reasons why she enjoys Cecily’s company. Cora is also protective of Cecily; she knows and understands that life does not always turn out the way we hope.

Q. Sylvia as a companion is a very intriguing character. Do you think that this role lent itself to conflict?

A. Cora and Sylvia’s interdependency, their joint—and often collaborative—manipulation of the truth means inevitable conflict. But as Cora’s companion and guest at Temple Hill, Sylvia is the one “cast out.”

In many ways Sylvia’s love for Cora mirrors Cora’s love for George. Both women take refuge in delusions. Both manipulate each other and the truth of events. Cora needs Sylvia to feed her delusion; Sylvia knows this and exploits it. Through her novels, Sylvia is able to offer Cora—the person she loves—a degree of assuagement, and a happy ending—albeit fictional. Cora needs Sylvia: to be her Hearer, to offer her some sort of atonement and hope. Sylvia’s sense of rejection, her jealousy of Cora’s love for George, finally ignites when she dares to question—and investigate for herself—the truth.

Q. In
The Last Summer
, you chose a rural setting for much of the novel, and in the
The Memory of Lost Senses
, we see English village life at the turn of the twentieth century. Can you explain why the landscape plays such an important part in your writing, and how you chose the location for
The Memory of Lost Senses
?

A. I think I’ve always been acutely aware of nature, the seasons and their effect on the landscape. I grew up in the country and my earliest memories are of staring up at clouds drifting across the sky. I can vividly recall moments—sights and sounds—so heartachingly beautiful that they had to be seized and captured, frozen in my mind’s eye so that I could own them forever; stored there so that I could revisit them at some point in the future. At boarding school in the Lake District, I spent an inordinate amount of time daydreaming, imagining stories as I stared out of windows at mountains shrouded in mist. Then I lived in London, and for twenty years my landscape was man-made: a congested street, the interior of an office or an underground train car.

After my family and I moved from London, for perhaps the first year we lived in the country, I felt as though I was on a long holiday. The sense of peace, the space, the light—being able to see the sky felt luxurious. There’s something indulgent—but absolutely necessary for the writer—in being able to stand and stare, allowing one’s thoughts to drift. I was struck once again by simple things: the beauty of the morning light on dew-covered grass, a winter sunset against the naked branches of trees, the sound of dripping leaves after rain, birdsong, silence. That sense of connectedness to nature was something I’d had as a child and then lost, so to rediscover it was joyful, inspiring. It unlocked my creativity and I wanted to capture it all, again; to re-create moments and beauty.

I’d always wanted to write, knew with absolute certainty that I was born to write, but the city had not brought me my muse . . . and the countryside did. Being in the country offered me space, time to drift and tune into the place I needed to be for my thoughts to take shape, for the images and words to come. How could I not write about the beauty of nature, the sights and sounds and smells of the landscape around me? It’s what finally gave me the impetus to write, what demanded to be captured all those years ago when I watched the mist roll down a mountainside.

The landscape was in a way the starting point for
The Last Summer
. It’s what came to me—what I saw—before the house, before any of the characters took shape. In
The Memory of Lost Senses
the narrative moves between city and country, between mid-nineteenth-century Rome and an early twentieth century Hampshire village, so I was moving between two time frames (or three, if one includes the second part of the novel, set in 1923) and two very different landscapes.

My research for Rome as a setting in the novel was harder, far harder than researching the village in Hampshire, because
Bramley
is based on my own village, the place where I now live. So I know the landscape, know its contours, its varying hues and moods; I look out at it every day. The physicality of the place was easy enough for me to write about. What I had to do was immerse myself in the village life of one hundred years ago. But my research and curiosity about the history of my home had naturally expanded to the village and surrounding area. I read extensively on local history, and once again—with the aid of old photographs—I could very easily picture the place. I learned that there had been a wealth of trades in the village, then, and many shops—not just one. Like other villages at that time, it had been self-sufficient for centuries and, consequently, insular.

I expanded my research further, went back in time in order to learn more: the arrival of the railways, the advent of mobility and its impact on rural communities. I read around and about Victorian England, the new-moneyed Victorian industrialists and their country houses, the poverty of agricultural workers, the depression in farming, and the inevitable exodus to cities. I wanted to be able to understand what it felt like to live in a village like my own at that time, and how an outsider, particularly one who had been an expatriate and had lived overseas for a lifetime, would be perceived by that community.

I’m not sure that I agree with the old dictum “write about what you know,” because here I am, with two novels set in another time. But I hope that by setting both novels in a landscape I’m familiar with, readers are able to see it too. After all, that’s what writing is about: transporting readers.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What did you enjoy most about
The Memory of Lost Senses
? What do you expect to recall about it six months from now?

2. Judith Kinghorn describes the themes of the book as duplicity, prejudice, child abuse, bigamy, lies, and reinvention. Discuss how each theme plays out in the novel.

3. The countess’s arrival in the village causes a stir of speculation. Discuss how life in a small English village in 1911 might foster such intense interest in the countess. What might the reaction be today?

4. The author fills the book with lavish descriptions of Cora’s estate, especially the art treasures she has brought back from Europe, and the surrounding gardens. Do these descriptions convey something about Cora’s state of mind?

5. Discuss the novel’s complex narrative structure—the many points of view, the back and forth in time and place, and the author’s deliberate withholding of information. Why do you think Judith Kinghorn chose to tell her story this way? How might she have done it differently, and would a different way have been more or less effective?

6. Discuss the major characters’ notions of romantic love. Do Cora, Cecily and Sylvia all see love similarly? And how do those different ideas influence the choices they make?

7. Discuss the complex relationship between Cora and Sylvia, especially in light of the author’s comments about them in the Conversation with Judith Kinghorn. How do they each manipulate the truth? How do they each foster the other’s illusions?

8. By the end of the book, do you have a clear sense of the chronology of Cora’s life? Can you list its significant events? Are there parts of her life that remain uncertain?

9. Did the resolution of Cecily and Jack’s relationship surprise you? Satisfy you?

10. Discuss the surprise twists at the end. Were you shocked? Did they help to complete your understanding of Cora and the choices she made? Of the choices the other characters made?

11. Discuss the idea of reinventing one’s life. How do the characters in this novel reinvent themselves? Can you think of other fictional characters who reinvent themselves? And do you know people in real life who have reinvented themselves?

12. The unreliability of memory is an important theme in the novel. Cora has forgotten her painful early memories as she has reinvented her past. With this in mind, to what extent can we trust her recollection of her love affair with George? And how is memory used in the second part of the book to expose Sylvia’s own delusions?

Read on for an excerpt from Judith Kinghorn’s “enchanting story of love and war”* set at the end of the Belle Époque, in which the upstairs-downstairs romance between a woman living in a large English country estate and the housekeeper’s son will be tested as World War I looms over Europe . . .

The Last Summer