Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  Fran stares towards the darkness. She knows exactly what Jane Austen thinks of her virtuosity, her magical tactile density. She also knows what she thinks of her Author’s faux modesty: those little pieces if ivory she claimed to be writing on with little effect. Really!

  Some readers say my books repeat themselves, continues Jane Austen, pretty girl catches eligible man: common romances. Not so. Only a jealous person understands real love, always one-sided. Fanny Price, my heroine with the undiverted heart.

  You betrayed her: said she’d have taken another man.

  I am a realist. I deal in probabilities.

  Pride and Prejudice: the girl who gets it all?

  Things exactly as they are, murmurs Jane Austen dreamily from her nook, a crimson horse and blue guitar. She pulls herself back to her time. One must earn pewter.

  You created weak Fanny Price to atone for Lizzie Bennet’s ludicrous luck – no virtue in being healthy.

  Annie regards Fran’s twitchy lips. ‘You could pretend you’re on a mobile phone.’

  Fran shrugs, waiting for her friend to mention the future. ‘You know, maybe oblique life-writing’s a good idea.’

  ‘You mean, if I wrote things down, I wouldn’t move my lips?’ ‘There’s a chance.’

  Fran looks at Annie seemingly so vivid and confident – yet with failure softly coughing in the wings. The thought swells her fondness.

  ‘Old women do talk to themselves. What cats are for,’ says Annie. Fran’s six years older than she is: it shows. Six years that counted for nothing twenty years back return to childhood impact: six years marks another generation now.

  Fran leans across Annie towards an old woman sitting with two men in an alcove lined with dark anaglypta paper. The men talk together, ignoring the woman as she meditatively sips a brown ale.

  ‘What’s old age?’ asks Fran.

  ‘Urine,’ says the woman.

  Unable to bear being left out, one man says, ‘People find you repugnant.’

  ‘How strange,’ says Fran. ‘I’d thought “repugnant” a woman’s word.’

  The men return to discussing car routes towards the North Sea coast, pitting the sleek A140 against the B1150 with its crawling hay-wains. The woman looks fixedly in the mottled mirror on one side of the alcove; she sees only the top of her head where hair is thinning, she strokes it like a wounded sparrow. ‘Disappointment,’ she mumbles.

  ‘You just accosted a stranger, Fran. You never used to do that.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I do now. Like Sebald.’

  ‘What?’

  Fran has known very few famous people. She clutches the opening. ‘W.G. Sebald. I once told him his posture of sitting absorbed and listening in an East Anglian pub wasn’t for women.’

  A relevant remark, for they’re in the kind of place Sebald might have chosen for the serendipity of a chance encounter.

  Not of course this pub: he needed a porous edge to vision, a glimpse of North Sea perhaps.

  ‘Remember how it goes. “You’re at the bar of the Crown Hotel in Southwold and you get into conversation with a Dutchman – your talk continues till last orders. A woman hasn’t the freedom.”’

  ‘Well yes,’ smiles Annie. The idea of Sebald amuses her. Author of best-selling books lacking irony, plot or characters, a splendid reproof to the creative-writing brigade who get up her nose. (She considers Jane Austen’s Emma equally plotless.)

  Money for old rope, she says – mainly when Rachel isn’t in earshot. Rachel makes good money teaching the stuff. (Annie judges from clothes – unaware her new pal benefits from an ample family trust fund.)

  ‘I think he said old women have freedom unless masquerading as young. I said a droll remark that invites a man into the cosy group of drinkers isn’t for an old woman. She’s invisible.’

  Fran forgets Sebald’s response. Encounters with celebrities or royalty are like that: one recalls what one said or might have said; what they murmured back floats off as lightly as a child’s balloon.

  Annie hopes Fran’s finished. She does meander. Comes from living alone. If encountered over the samovar, her Agafia would never shut up about catching fish and planting potato tubers. She’d be a hopeless listener.

  ‘George Borrow, that’s the chap Sebald reminds me of,’ says Annie. ‘Wild Wales and Lavengro.’

  ‘He wrote in German,’ says Fran. ‘From outside it seems to me life was good to him, so his melancholic pose – OK temper – was if not an affectation then a kind of boredom. Lugubriousness, fame, masculine privilege, a little guilt, and authority: might almost be Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.’ A pause. ‘His boredom speaks to readers. His work’s a sort of pilgrimage into the soul, in its autumn.’

  ‘Shit, where’d you read that?’

  Annie hasn’t actually finished a Sebald book – or indeed a George Borrow. ‘Yup, boredom,’ she says, adding, ‘I don’t believe self-expression’s ever authentic.’ She strokes the tiny peacock feather on her red felt hat, then twists a black-dyed curl.

  Annie’s voice is too posh for a rural pub. ‘Let’s be off,’ Fran says. ‘Just a jiff, must use the loo.’

  As she enters, she finds Jane Austen joining her. You see, smiles Fran, a writer must be absent to be authentic. You knew that.

  The Author is uninterested. You would do well to leave the country as your friend advises.

  Cheeky. Wasn’t it Austenland that made Fran imagine contentment among green fields?

  Different were you rooted here.

  Sebald wasn’t rooted. Yet Southwold has his imprint.

  Fran tightens her lips in the mirror over the washbasin, framed on one side by a plastic poinsettia. She’s moved by the care taken to brighten up a dingy windowless box of a room. Jane Austen assumes the sardonic look her sister Cassandra caught in the iconic sketch now in the National Portrait Gallery (and worth millions). She’s about to speak when Fran enters one of the two cubicles.

  A none-too-clean pub toilet’s no place for critical badinage. Fran emerges. Go on, I’m listening. But no one else is in the mirror.

  She washes her hands perfunctorily. The air-dryer isn’t working, so she rubs them on her stiff hemp jacket. The poin-settia no longer seems a friendly sign. She returns to find Annie by the door, only just restraining impatience.

  A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer, whispers Jane Austen. She channels Emma, a character for whom she has a very soft spot.

  Irritated, Fran turns back. Emma never sees ‘nothing’. What she sees is half imaginary, the rest just theatre.

  Jane Austen smirks. Author and character are imaginists: they see nothing to see everything. She swishes out the door, leaving only the faintest whiff of that wicked narrative voice.

  A car speeds alarmingly round the bend. It nearly runs into them as they scramble onto the verge by Carr’s pond. You could kill or be killed round here.

  ‘Didn’t your Sebald die on the road?’ asks Annie as they regain the tarmac.

  ‘He was a ferocious driver, but he had an aneurism. I guess he died at speed.’

  The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan drove fast. He was proud of being uninhibited, ignoring a red light, a kind of signifier. Where the signifier isn’t functioning, it speaks on its own. We suffer auditory hallucinations and crash into pieces, caught in psychotic fantasies.

  ‘Goodness,’ says Fran, ‘what mumbo-jumbo.’

  Mmm, thinks Annie. ‘Not really.’

  One isn’t paid well to be intelligible, whispers Jane Austen falling in with the friends. Every profession has its jargon.

  ‘Do you remember me mentioning my ex-student Thomas,’ says Annie, ‘the Shelley-devotee? He says Shelley needs speed to feel alive. He skids down slopes, sails through wind, projects mechanical wings and boats.’

  On the last lap to the cottage, along a route more bridleway than footpath, they walk single file to avoid hoof-squashed mud. Darkness is pierced by a partly clouded full moon and
a dim torch.

  Annie returns to Fran’s way of life, ‘You’ll get odder alone. In the pub you guzzled both packets of crisps quite absent-mindedly. As if no one else existed with a mouth.’

  Fran stops abruptly, then turns. ‘I suppose I could leave,’ she says. ‘Jeoffry’s wandered off, probably found a fishier home.’

  ‘There you are then. Cats are never homeless.’

  ‘It would be an adventure.’

  ‘If you sit in the centre of a seesaw you get none of the fun of going up and down.’ Fran snorts: Annie’s been in one place and one job these past thirty years.

  As they near the lit cottage, Fran senses its comfortable settling in grassy ground. ‘I’d miss it. A boat on a swamp. If you pressed a knitting needle through the grass, water’d well up and swish against its walls.’

  Not wanting to appear ungracious, Annie says, ‘It’s been a good visit.’

  ‘Blickling and Felbrigg?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m not a National Trust devotee. Even when houses are open.’

  ‘You old Marxist! You and your dad!’

  ‘Nah,’ sniffs Annie. Any mention of Zach Klein – even when softened into Fran’s demotic ‘dad’ – makes her edgy. ‘They should be care homes, hospitals, boarding-schools, refugee centres – or wrecks after bricks and girders have been stolen by the displaced.’

  ‘Don’t care for the rich now or then, but houses have a sort of life – if you burn or knock them apart, they hurt.’

  This wistful strain annoys Annie. Identities don’t come from houses, places or culture. She calls them – well, when the matter concerns white British – identities of exclusion. She finds a literary palliative. ‘Do you know that short story by Virginia Woolf, “A haunted house”? No? About a house with a pulse and beating heart. The ghosts are a couple seeking their old joy where there’s the shadow of a thrush and sounds of wood pigeons, that kind of rusticry.’ She doesn’t add there’s treasure in the house: love or the light in the heart. It would only encourage Fran.

  ‘There you are then. You like Anglo-pastoral after all.’ Fran unlatches her gate.

  ‘Only in words.’

  ‘You know there’s a hedgehog hibernating over there in the pile of leaves.’ Fran’s eyes shine in the outside light. ‘They roll into a ball so spiky only badgers and humans can penetrate it. People tell lies about hedgehogs, collecting fruit on spikes for winter, their dung curing baldness – or is that stewed hedgehog? Suckling cows, so ruining our milk. Mating must be stressful with those prickles, don’t you think?’

  Aware of the surrounding darkness and her damp feet, Annie wishes Fran would shut up and open the triple locks of her back door.

  3

  In one of the two big bedrooms forming the first floor of the cottage with the great chimney piece between them, Fran sits on her small double bed. She contemplates Jane Austen sidling into the room.

  A little perambulating round Southern England but otherwise such stability! How’d you have coped with rootlessness, nomadism without tent and tribe? (Can one envy a ghost?) You needed midwives in life and work. You’d have been a lady writing upstairs on her little writing-table without the handy brothers. Waiting on a curate or pompous college fellow to remove the shame of spinsterhood.

  Got that off your chest? sniggers Jane Austen. You are so residually Victorian: my sister and I never thought of women as spinsters, surplus or odd. We were ladies – and I, in addition, was an Author.

  It’s a point of view.

  Why do a ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’: splattered on her path through life by mud from contemptuous boots and hooves? Being what? A poor teacher, companion, governess, hack writer, exhibitionist of women’s ‘rights’. Surely better loll in a warm family carriage, not your own woman perhaps but always a lady?

  I had no command of the carriage, protests Jane Austen. It was not yet the Age of Woman. You can’t anticipate history, though you can rewrite it, as your age is doing. I kept it at my back.

  Fran’s rebuked. She knows as well as Jane Austen (and Annie?) the humiliating lack of control one has over one’s life at any time. Does one have a duty to be mutinous?

  She goes downstairs. Her slippers edge each creaking step as her hands brush bulging walls. She likes the modest difficulty of ascent and descent. It makes her feel a benign stranger at home.

  Annie’s boiling a kettle for night-time tea. Fran can no longer drink it without needing to get up three times to pee. Each evening she leaves the cooling tea by the kitchen sink.

  As she holds her warm floral mug, Annie watches Fran pouring herself a glass of tap water. She grins, thinking of Rachel and her habit of sipping from a little plastic bottle, as if she were a coddled baby or rare tropical flower needing the constant drip of tepid liquid.

  The tap water has mineral and industrial traces; they remind Fran of childhood doses of chalybeate when the family visited mid-Wales and Dad gleefully told them – every time – how health-giving and good this foul-tasting liquid was for body and soul. Mum laughed and spat it out.

  Fran drains the glass. It’s the kind meant to hold a tooth-brush. Her eyes rest on it; she pushes it towards the sink, feeling protective of her objects.

  Clutching her mug of tea, Annie glances at the framed photo on a windowsill of Andrew with Johnnie as a toddler sitting proudly on his father’s shoulders. ‘We did proper mothering didn’t we? We didn’t knock the hell out of them to create self-discipline. The kids have more self-esteem than we have; isn’t that the point of it all? – though my mother’d have said self-discipline’s equally important.’

  ‘You don’t often speak of her,’ says Fran, ‘mostly Zach.’

  Annie shrugs. ‘He was more distinct, as tyrants are.’ Her expression grows pensive. ‘Sadie was house-proud, but she’d dust round my books to avoid disturbing my revising. Not sure I did it for Daniel and Esther. Come to think, I didn’t dust. You know,’ she adds seeing Fran’s quizzing expression, ‘I was so proud when that rat of a husband said he loved me more than he loved his mother.’

  She’s drunk too much of the pub’s cheap wine: she’ll regret this talk in the morning. Her disrupted marriage is taboo here. ‘But see how well they’ve turned out. Lucky, I guess.’

  Not entirely, thinks Fran. Annie’s involvement in mothering was minimal and she, Fran, stepped in when her friend was off at conferences, electing to stay on – just a few days because she’d probably never again see Vancouver or Berlin. So, a birthday would be missed if Fran hadn’t carted the three children to some downmarket chain for hamburgers and ice cream. Sometimes – and it’s an ignoble thought – she wonders whether Annie’s enthusiasm for her buying the Norfolk cottage was to make a holiday home for her kids – and at times herself.

  Annie knows what Fran suspects. The cottage is pleasant to relax in, with someone else doing (basic) cooking and cleaning. In abstract, she doesn’t like the country, but her memories – buttressed by sun-lit photos with espaliered apple tree or reed-edged pond – are some of her best. Never so happy as when being served – and no Paul in the frame.

  Mainly of course, Annie comes for Fran.

  You can value a friend and find her useful.

  ‘No, we didn’t do so badly,’ she pursues, putting her mug on the wet spot left by Fran’s glass, then pushing it back and forwards with her finger. ‘We didn’t have daughters who got leglessly drunk or drugged on the King’s Road. Yet, maybe we didn’t do everything right. All three have edged away, haven’t they?’ Annie checks herself. She’s not been such a bad parent, though she admits taking her youth after the children were born. She hadn’t had an earlier chance.

  Mother-love asks nothing back, Fran muses; yet there’s a nagging undertow: surely some thanks might be returned for so much care, treasure and anxiety expended – however puny or by rights it all seems to the grown child. Had Johnnie left so early because he resented time lavished on Annie’s children? He’d never said, neither as man nor boy.

  He disli
ked Esther and Daniel. Maybe he’d wanted his mother to himself. Now he’ll be looking from his low, beautiful house at the brilliant landscape of Antipodean mountains and blue lake, thinking sometimes of Fran in her wet little cottage. She could come to live near them and her grandchildren, he’s said, knowing neither will wish it.

  He’d once brought his family on a visit. Mum was there too, taken from the home to beam from her vacant mind. Johnnie was so gentle with her, while Daphne looked on proudly. Her daughter-in-law (the term would always be novel) talked in a high-pitched voice that grated on Fran, but she was a nice enough young woman. She kept the children pretty as pictures.

  How Fran had yearned for these grandchildren! In the flesh, she felt less than expected. She didn’t know how to treat them, the little prince and princess who turned up cute noses at toys she bought them at the craft fair. Yet, she felt immense love when she received their pictures; she framed the black and white ones in silver. Leave it at that.

  Johnnie had been the apple of his grandma’s eye when it saw clearly. She’d listened with pride as he stammered out a poem he’d written while she – Fran reddens at the memory – corrected his grammar. Dad had been proud to find a childish poem of hers in the county magazine, an awful thing of bird-song, hawthorn and high Wordsworthian sentiment. He’d not corrected her – but of course her grammar had been perfect – and his wasn’t always.

  We can’t all be teenage geniuses. She nudges Jane Austen.

  The friends exchange glances. Each thinks she shows age a little less than the other, wrinkles round the mouth, incipient or pronounced dewlap, drooping eyelid.

  Light in the small-windowed cottage is dim, so Fran has no constant idea how she looks. ‘Do you think I should wear makeup? I’m getting grey all over, face, hair, clothes, everything. Would you remark if I appeared with green nails and a slash of crimson mouth?’

  ‘I would,’ laughs Annie. She doubts her friend has the skill or patience to make up a clown’s face. ‘You look fine,’ she says, adding ‘to me.’ She picks up the floral mug again and drinks the strong dregs.