The Peacock 10

 This place is as remote as one can get, while still being within a couple of hour's drive to Vancouver.  To be honest, I don't know where I am.  I followed the instructions and found myself in a little town just east of Mission, not far from the famous monastery.  But I was not destined for any monastery.  I didn't even know the name of the little town where I waited for Melissa.  But arrangements had already been made.  There was a garage ready to take my car for the month or longer I would be needing to be here (Carl has already mentioned to me that if I need to stay longer than one month, to not worry about it, that I will be more than welcome.  Melissa pulled up in front of the little diner I was nursing a late afternoon coffee in, then strode quickly inside, looked at me and simply said, "Ready?".  I said, "You would be..." and she curtly replied, "Melissa."  "How did you know it's me?"  She replied that Father Griffin had emailed them my photo.

That was when I realized I had forgotten my name, and she didn't once mention my name throughout the more than two hour drive up to the mansion.  She in fact, didn't mention anything.  I found myself perfectly incapable of making any kind of conversation, polite or otherwise, with her. It was like riding with an extremely taciturn cab or Uber driver.  I think she might be somewhere on the autism spectrum.   And why couldn't I remember my name?  Why can I still not remember my name?

I don't know where I might have got Cosme from.  It was like pulling a rabbit out of my hat.  Cosme.  I have never seen or heard that name before.  But maybe I have heard it in the past, simply can't remember?  I mean, if I am going to so easily forget my own name, then maybe I will have also forgotten almost anything else.

We took a dirt road that wound it's way up through the mountains, at times a steep and bumpy ride.  We passed a couple of farms, then, there was only forest, and the road.  This has to be the longest car ride I have ever taken, or so it feels, anyway.  Now, I have completely lost my bearings,.  And this place is so extraordinary.  It suggests an English manor house on what  must be several hectares of a beautifully landscaped property with gardens and lawns and meadows, all surrounded completely by dense impenetrable forest.  Where I am seated now, in front of the magnolia tree, the forest is virgin, primeval, all massive trunks of douglas fir, sitka spruce, hemlock and cedar with ferns and salmonberry and salal and hanging moss, and it is so beautiful, cool and holy out here in this place.  

This is rather an interesting novel by the way, in the meandering and tediously detailed style of this woman's writing.  Doris Lessing.  Strange, I have never heard of her.  but  I still can't remember my real name or if even I ever had a name. The novel so far is about a young woman from South Africa, or thereabouts, white with British roots, who is now in London just after the war, and her adventures there.  She seems also to be trying to intentionally forget who she was.  for example, this little passage:

Between ‘Matty’ and such sad buffoons, the difference was one of degree. Somewhere early in her childhood, on that farm on the highveld, ‘Matty’ had been created by her as an act of survival. But why? In order to prevent herself from being-what? She could not remember. But during the last few years before leaving ‘home’ (now not where she was, England, previously ‘home’, of a sort, but that town she had left), ‘Matty’ had not existed, there had not been a need for her. Martha had forgotten ‘Matty’, and it was painful to give her house-room again. But here she was, just as if she had not been in abeyance for years, ready at the touch of a button to chatter, exclaim, behave with attractive outrageousness, behave’ like a foolish but lovable puppy. In this house. With Jimmy and Iris. (Not with Stella down the river, not at all.) Here. Why? For some days now Martha had been shut inside this person, it was ‘Martha’ who intruded, walked into ‘Matty’, not the other way about. Why? She was also, today, shut inside clothes that dressed, she felt, someone neither Martha, nor ‘Matty’. 

It is probably time to head back to the house, since it must be almost two, and Carl wants to have with everyone a talk.  I have craned my neck in every which direction, and still there is no sign of the peacock...