REBELLION AND RESPECTABILITY
During the next few weeks Shelley called regularly, becoming, in the opinion of my parents, a model of elder-brotherly affection to both Jane and myself. Although it was Papa who hoped to win Shelley as a rich patron, it was Shelley who charmed Papa, spending hours in discussion with him after we ladies had retired from the dining table, and publicly declaring himself a disciple of Papa’s ideas about social reform. If Papa suspected the real reason for this blossoming friendship he did not speak of it. He merely basked in Shelley’s admiration, trusting that financial support from such a wealthy man would follow.
Jane and I would often accompany Shelley on walks to the churchyard where my mother was buried, the very place he had suggested to Mama on his first visit. He liked to sit with us on a stone bench there, reading poems or telling stories of his exploits.
Having been expelled from university because he refused to believe in God, and thrown off by his rich father, who approved of neither his beliefs nor his style of living, he now struggled to provide for himself by publishing poems and relying on the generosity of friends. My father persisted in his belief that Shelley had some money in the form of trusts or legacies, but Shelley did not provide a penny to help with Papa’s outstanding rental payments. In view of Shelley’s sensational history, his gift of Cowper’s Hymns was surely a joke.
Most sensationally of all, the story of his wife, Harriet, emerged. It sounded like a fairy tale. He had abducted her from her boarding school three years previously, when she was sixteen and he was nineteen, and had married her despite parental disapproval on both sides. They had had a baby girl, Ianthe, and Harriet was now expecting a second child.
“Sixteen!” exclaimed Jane. “You should be ashamed of yourself!”
Shelley, who was sitting between us on the bench, hung his head. “I am ashamed,” he confessed. I could tell from his voice, though Jane could not, that he was teasing her. “But I am obliged to bear it as best I can. My susceptibility to sixteen-year-old feminine beauty will not abate, whatever I may do.” He raised his eyes to her face, then to mine. “Have you any remedy you might suggest?”
“You are a very bad man!” I scolded. “Have you no pity for my sister’s sensibilities? She believes every word you say.”
Shelley slid off the bench and knelt on the grass in front of me. “And you do not? Madam, I entreat you, hear me,” he said, rolling his eyes theatrically. “I can explain.”
Jane and I exchanged amused looks.
“I will hear you,” I agreed, “if you will stop these monkey tricks and be serious.”
He became serious. He sat cross-legged like a schoolboy, looking from one to the other of us as he spoke. “My wife Harriet and I are estranged. We have not lived together for months. I will not weary you with the details, but I would wager that the unborn child is not mine but her present lover’s.”
Jane and I both gasped. Then, because this struck us as funny, we laughed at the same time too. And Shelley, who never could remain grave for two minutes, began to laugh, and kissed our hands.
“Why should a man with a miserable marriage,” he demanded, “whose wife has wantonly abandoned him for someone else, not enjoy new acquaintance?”
“Acquaintance with sixteen-year-old feminine beauty, that is?” asked Jane archly.
“Of course!” cried Shelley. “I adore you all!”
He might adore us all, but I adored only him. Handsome, brave, rebellious, gifted, and adhering without scruple to the principles of both my parents’ writings, he could do no wrong. Freedom for slaves! Freedom for women! Freedom from marriage! Freedom for everyone to love as, when and where they will! And a freedom of his own, his championship of which impressed me more than any other. Freedom for the human race to live without the tyranny of religion!
To my eyes he was beyond doubt a genius.
I did not, indeed I could not, resist his charm. I saw no one but him, dreaming or waking. My eyes did not function unless he was there for them to look at. I fell in love so madly I almost did not recognize it as love. It was madness and nothing else.
Shelley was never unkind to Jane. Indeed, he always treated her like a glittering accessory, a beguiling addition to our party. But as it became more and more obvious that it was my “acquaintance” he wanted, I ceased to think about any claim her superior beauty might have on him.
My trusty confidante and I held candlelit meetings in her room, hours after the rest of the household was asleep. Jane sat in the bed, rosy-faced, wearing her coverlet as a cloak, quizzing and scolding me by turns.
“He is the perfect man, Mary, but quite unattainable,” she complained. “Why cannot you forget him, and join me in our search for men who are free to marry us? Why have you abandoned your sister’s prospects? I call it very selfish!”
“Because I love him.”
“But he is married!”
“She has betrayed him.”
“And he has no money!”
“Papa thinks he has money.”
“Papa is wrong. Do you not recognize a parasite when you see one?”
“Do not call him that!”
“I will call him what I like.” She tossed her head, which was covered all over with curl papers. “He is the well-known species of Parasitus charmingus, identified by its high degree of personal beauty, large brain and warm heart.”
I laughed aloud.
“Shh!” She shook me by the arm. “Do you want to wake them all?”
“Yes,” I replied, still laughing. “I want to wake them all and tell them that I am in love!”
Poor Jane had no power to dissuade me from my course. All of my senses were fine-tuned to squeeze every pleasure from each moment with Shelley. I read and reread his tattered notes, and put them away with sprigs of lavender in a locked box. I spent an embarrassingly long time during one of his visits devising a way to approach him from behind with my sewing scissors, and cut off one of his curls to put in my locket. Then I was too afraid to do it.
Secretly I planned a future with him, Harriet or no Harriet.
He would eventually, I was sure, find a way to marry me. We would make peace with his father and have a large country house and a London apartment, and be at the very centre of society, a world I longed to enter but because of my Radical background had never imagined I would.
In truth, I wanted everything: rebellion and respectability, dreams and reality. An angel and a man.
I dreamt he wrote me a letter. So perfect a letter, so full of love and joy, that it could only exist in a dream, because real letters are not perfect. They are instruments of torture. They bring promises of meetings, prosperity, new acquaintance, and news of old acquaintance, babies’ health, the achievements of sons and the marriages of daughters. They tell of death and despair. But they are insubstantial, untrue, faithless. Like love itself.
The words in the dream-letter were not ordinary words. I had superhuman powers, which allowed me to lift them physically off the page. Some of them I put in my mouth. They tasted bitter, but I could not spit them out. A pile of them lay on the ground. I plunged my hand into them and scattered them like garden leaves. They settled again in different places, mirror images of themselves, written backwards. Others flew about my face and neck, moth-like, not quite biting me but causing me distress. I exclaimed and pushed them away, but they persisted, and I began to scratch my skin.
All his beautiful words, turning into monster-moths.
Perhaps dreams mean nothing, but this dream was hard to bear. Others may scorn the idea that what we see in life we see in our dreams, horribly twisted out of recognizable shape. But I believe it.
LOVER
How strange. However much we plan, and hope, and map things in our minds, life never reads the same script as we have prepared. It tears up our predictions and laughs at us for presuming to make them.
As spring became summer and the foliage in the churchyard thickened, Shelley and I spent countless hour
s alone there. He had no profession, no superiors to call him to task, no family commitments to tempt him away. Although he was, by his own and my father’s account, an ambitious young man with the future at his feet, he always seemed to have a great deal of spare time to devote to recreation and courtship.
We never went into society. He never took me to the theatre or a ball, or even to dine with his friends. I was far too perfect, he would say, to be shown off to people whose admiration of his “heart’s echo”, as he called me, would make him jealous.
Privately I suspected this shunning of social events to be due more to his very public estrangement from his wife, and his consciousness that I was the daughter of infamous parents, than jealousy. But I kept my counsel, and went willingly with him to the churchyard whenever the opportunity presented itself.
I was, of course, supposed to be chaperoned. Fanny refused this appointment, so Mama had to rely on Jane. Dear, sly, untrustworthy Jane.
She was our ally. She would pretend to Mama that she was accompanying us, but would walk with us only as far as the end of the street, which Mama could see from her lace-curtained window. Once round the corner Jane would set off to enjoy her own unchaperoned time, having arranged to meet us an hour later in order to walk back with us to the house. A simple deception, but parents, as every sixteen-year-old knows, are simple.
One brilliant June day, when Jane had left us as usual, Shelley and I sought our favourite spot, a clearing in the churchyard shaded by yew trees and hidden from passers-by. Careless of my white gown I sat on the grass among the fragrant trees, my skin warmed by the shadow-dappled sun, my bonnet and parasol discarded beside me.
Shelley dropped his jacket, but remained standing. His face looked troubled. He scanned the view, his hand resting on the back of his neck under his shirt collar. In his other hand was a folded piece of paper.
“You are nervous,” I observed.
He did not sit down. “I am not nervous.”
“What is the matter, then?”
“I have written a poem.”
“Indeed?” This was not unusual. I waited to hear his explanation.
“It is a poem addressed to … to Mary someone.”
“Ah.”
“Do you wish me to read it to you?”
“Of course, if you will sit down and stop fidgeting.”
He sat beside me. On his face was a look of tenderness so clear and youthful, it compelled me to embrace him. I propelled myself into his arms like a spaniel. “I am the Mary someone, am I not?” I demanded.
When he laughed his habit was to open his mouth only slightly, sometimes biting his lower lip, as if he were trying to stifle the laughter. Far from being melancholy, as poets are popularly supposed to be, he was capable of behaving like a spaniel too. “Of course you are. And I hope you know what an honour you receive.”
He unfolded the paper. The poem was, indeed, about me. But it did not merely tell of his love. It revealed how deeply he desired me to love him. As he read, his voice softened; he was scarcely speaking above a whisper by the time he read,
“Gentle and good and mild thou art,
Nor can I live if thou appear
Aught but thyself, or turn thine heart
Away from me…”
When he finished I was so moved that I could not control my tears, which dripped off the end of my nose in an unladylike stream. I had no handkerchief. Shelley did not laugh, but grinned with such profound affection that I forgot how ridiculous I must look and accepted his offer of the end of his tie to wipe my face with. He never had a handkerchief either.
“Oh, Shelley!” I said, when I could speak. “Are these beautiful verses to be published?”
He was sitting cross-legged as usual, looking for all the world like the poor boy Aladdin from the Thousand and One Nights. Unkempt, expectant, on the verge of discovering treasure in an unexpected place. He folded the poem and put it in the pocket of his jacket which lay beside him on the grass. Then he caught me round the waist very tightly, so that I could not push him away. He pressed my head to his chest. Beneath my ear, through the thin linen of his shirt, I felt his heart’s regular beat, and the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.
“No, they will not be published. As long as I have a wife living, anyway,” he added, and kissed me.
I received the kiss, feeling hot. I wished he would not hold me quite so tightly. My corset was digging into my flesh and I could not get my breath. But Shelley did not appear to notice my discomfort. He brought his face close to mine.
“The fact that I am much more in love with you than I could ever be with Harriet, or any other woman, will not hinder the progress of scandal. So, my dearest Mary, these lines are ours, and ours alone. They mark today as a special day, which I would not want the public to have knowledge of.”
I swallowed. I still could not breathe freely. But I could not move, and had abandoned all thought of doing so. “A special day?” I echoed.
“Yes…”
He kissed me again. This kiss was more purposeful than the previous one. My head felt heavy, and full of some substance which obscured my wits. I could not think. I could not find my conscience. I saw his smile widen. How happy and beautiful he was! Desire rushed over my body, as recklessly as a stream splashes over rocks.
“Today is my birthday,” he said, laughing. “I am twenty-two today.”
He took my face in his hands. My unbalanced brain did not work properly. I found myself trying to kiss his fingers, though my lips could not possibly reach them.
“Can you imagine what is the very best, the most beautiful birthday present you could give me?” he asked.
I was too close to him to see what he was doing, and too intoxicated to protest. My dress disappeared from my shoulders. I was sure I had not loosened it, nor taken the pins from my hair.
“I will remember this day for ever, dearest girl,” he told me, and pushed me gently backwards on the grass.
I had lost my powers of reasoning. I was beyond resistance. Shelley and I were the only living things in a world full of unfeeling creatures. The grass and trees, the churchyard, even the sky, disappeared. I was not aware of pain, or even of the ecstasy Jane had unreliably informed me I would feel at this moment. I was aware only that I was with the man I loved in a place from which there was no escape.
And all the time Shelley and I were celebrating his birthday, Jane sat, waiting in the church porch without her bonnet on, her small, finely-shod feet crossed and her ringlets resting innocently against her cheek.
MASTER
Our idyll was short-lived. No more than a month later I was summoned to the drawing-room to hear that someone – nameless, of course – had seen me walking in the churchyard with Mr Shelley, unchaperoned.
I could not tell which face was redder: my stepmother’s quivered with anger, but the origins of my father’s heightened colour lay in embarrassment. I was sorry for him, but I was stubborn too.
“I do not deny that I sent Jane away,” I declared. I had no wish to fuel my stepmother’s fury by implicating her daughter. “She is not to blame. And I am not afraid to admit my feelings for Shelley. As for his feelings for me…”
“They do not exist, I tell you!” broke in Mama. She was in distress, her hands clutching at her gown. “He asked to call, he brought you a book, he wandered in the square and the churchyard with you and Jane a few times. He took tea with me here and dined with us. That is not love, you simpleton.” She sat down heavily on the sofa. “You do it, William,” she instructed my father. “I can speak to her no longer.”
My father contemplated me for a few moments. “My dear child…”
“Ach!” said my stepmother in disgust, and turned her face to the peacock-covered cushions.
“My dear child,” my father began again. “I fear you do not understand the seriousness of this situation.”
“What situation, Papa? That I have fallen in love with a young man who has fallen in love with me?�
�
“Yes, that situation. And no, not that one.”
“Get on with it!” demanded Mama.
“As you know, the young man in question, Mr Shelley, cannot make you his wife,” said my father. “He is already married, although it is true that he and his wife are estranged.”
“It is true,” put in Mama, “that he abandoned her to misery and humiliation!”
I could not allow this. “It is not true!” I protested. “She has turned to another man, and is carrying his child.”
My father looked at me with pity. “Mary, there is no doubt over the paternity of Mrs Shelley’s second baby. She was already with child when her husband left her.”
“I do not believe you.”
I knew my father’s intolerance of scenes, so was resolved upon keeping my temper and countenance. My tone was measured, my voice calm. I could not tell them that my “friendship” with Shelley had already become much more than that, and that I had reason to believe there would shortly be another child to consider, of whose paternity there was also no doubt whatsoever. The complexities of Shelley’s private life were more sensational than they, or anyone, knew.
“I know more of what has happened between him and his wife than you do,” I continued. “You are repeating rumours in a way that grieves me, and will grieve Shelley when I tell him.”
“Grieve Shelley?” said Mama scornfully. “And so it should!” She snapped her fan shut in a way that could have only been designed to irritate and pointed it at me. “You must never see him again. I forbid it.” She glanced at my father. “Your papa forbids it. You will stay at home and help in the shop, and Mr Shelley will be prevented from visiting. This situation is intolerable. We shall be the laughing-stock of London.”
“Mama is concerned for your reputation,” said my father.
“No she is not!” The bitter words came out before I could stop them. “She is concerned for her own reputation, just as you are concerned for yours!”
Angelmonster Page 3
