Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  ‘I could go,’ Fran repeats as Annie prepares to leave. ‘I didn’t say but I’ve got rats as well as mice. Scuttling behind the wardrobe. I was here for a job. If I’d chosen for solitude, I think I’d have gone to Wales.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ grins Annie remembering Alan Partridge. To cover the discourtesy, she continues, ‘Thomas wants to pursue young Shelley to Wales. He needs a bit of factual ballast for his book. Did you know Shelley went there?’

  Fran groans.

  ‘The rats,’ says Annie, ‘I heard them in the night. Aren’t there rodent exterminators in Norfolk?’

  ‘There’s also a hole in the bathroom floor. I think some of my lost rings and things have fallen into it. The rats might be down there too.’

  ‘Nice for the next owners to find if you sold the place. The rings and things, I mean.’

  ‘And bats,’ says Fran. ‘Would anyone ever buy the cottage if they knew?’

  ‘You could rent it.’

  ‘They’d find out about the rats and bats and the septic tank and want a reduction. Best sell if I were to move.’

  ‘You do know a ghost depreciates a house?’

  *

  Annie pulls the wheels of her Mandarina Duck case down the second crooked staircase, trying not to knock off her cloche hat where the ceiling slopes. On her lower back is her light-blue backpack full of books she meant to read but didn’t. It pulls at her shoulders: she hopes it works on posture like the back-straps Rachel sometimes wears. ‘I look like a cartoon burglar,’ she remarks as she slithers it against the spongy cream plaster.

  ‘Funny word,’ says Fran. ‘Robbers, thieves, burglars, purloiners, pilferers, why not stealers? all taking what they want, what’s another’s. Pirate, highwayman, buccaneer, brigand, biographer, plagiarist.’

  ‘Plagiarism’s not a hanging offence,’ says Annie, flushing as she recalls its malicious power over vain Zach Klein. Scuppering an honour as fast as paedophilia or the unspeakable n—— word.

  Fran begins turning the keys in the three stiff locks, pushing out the naked clematis vine that hangs over one of them. In this bare time, Annie should remember summer loveliness, the earthenware planters of tobacco flowers and fuchsia, violets and blushing dwarf roses; the pink glazed pot of bright-leafed camelia. She had admired the summer blooming, though not enough: now she’s forgotten it.

  Some of the bricks in the path have rotted, perhaps January ice made them flake. It’s new laid and the quick decay saddens Fran. ‘I didn’t altogether choose Jane Austen,’ she says. ‘Actually’ –and she lowers her voice – ‘I’d rather have bedded down with someone less commonly admired, someone more remote and intellectual.’

  Annie’s surprised. A little worried too. The thing sounds serious. As they pass through the wooden gate, she smiles back hiding her thoughts. ‘Oh, I think you did choose. Isn’t there mileage in having an iconic, branded author to teach and talk about. Never at a loss for conversation.’

  ‘You’re so wrong,’ says Fran carefully closing her gate. She’s had a notice printed and tacked onto it telling anyone who opens it to close it again. The postman ignores the instruction. No matter: the sign is part of proper householding.

  ‘Well I guess I don’t do ghosts,’ says Annie shoving the wheels of her Mandarina Duck case into the boot of Fran’s Mini. Both women are short, Fran shorter, but still it feels cramped.

  ‘Your dad Zach?’ Fran says, too low for Annie’s ears.

  The train stops neatly by the narrow platform. Annie enters, dragging in her case. She stands in the open doorway. ‘Don’t worry so much about words, dear Fran.’

  ‘We laugh a lot, don’t we, Annie? Perhaps not so much this time.’

  ‘Freud says humour isn’t resigned,’ begins Annie but doors close before she finishes. Her carriage’s almost empty, so the books sit by themselves.

  I believe your Annie consumes rather than reads books, remarks Jane Austen ambling onto the platform.

  You mean she uses and excretes? grins Fran.

  As the train starts to move, the friends wave through the closed window, Fran waving that bit longer. She looks where Annie had been standing and steps carefully over the warmed spot.

  Climbing back into the Mini, she thinks that, despite her tartness, Jane Austen makes the world a little less cold than it might otherwise be. The most important thing is resilience, she concludes, elasticity of mind.

  And virtue, says Jane Austen from the back seat.

  Fran ignores her.

  4

  Two months later, Fran leaves Norfolk to visit Annie. She doesn’t show to best advantage in Cambridge. Getting a place at the famous university had been the achievement of her youth: arriving there and leaving were anti-climactic.

  On the train, she catches herself in the grimy window, notes the infrequently tinted soft hair and tortoiseshell spectacles. Curious how the artificial emerges beyond the ‘natural’. Is what she sees an antitype, a prototype, a duplicate, an image?

  Why the recent propensity to see parts of herself – in mirrors, windows, people’s sunglasses, even shiny kitchen gadgets in John Lewis? Morbid astonishment – or disbelief – at age, that constant bass note to the trills of life?

  Agafia lacks a mirror, hence her contented smile.

  Sometimes Fran believes she makes, on first acquaintance, a tolerable impression. Then, seeing through other eyes, she notes her error: acting bouncy forty instead of staid seventy.

  She looks again at the dirty windowpane. Without spectacles and one slightly droopy lid – ‘ptosis’ apparently – mightn’t her eyes be thought rather fine? By?

  Don’t even whisper Mr Darcy.

  She turns from the window. Muriel Spark said being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. We survive among the dead and dying. Fran chuckles. Not quite: Annie will always be young.

  The train approaches Cambridge. People shift, remove earplugs, click off phones, close notebooks and laptops, drain cardboard cups of tepid coffee before squashing them to splatter drop-down trays. Through the window, the road by the train track is filling with racing bicycles.

  They pass glassy asymmetrical buildings in Lego shapes. How imaginative! one might say to a four-year-old if she’d made them. Fran thinks of the grass and sedgy pools these gaudy, rebarbative things displace. The melancholy she associates with old Cambridge envelops the new – until she remembers its orderly urban ducks.

  From the rack she pulls down her flowered Cath Kidston holdall, then bustles into her linen jacket.

  Good humour and cheerful spirits, says Jane Austen.

  Fran and Annie perch on wooden stools in warm early-May sun under an umbrella decorated with beer logos. It shows signs of mould from its wintering. They wait for Rachel to join them.

  Soon, Fran hopes, for, back on home territory and with a couple of gins inside her, Annie broods over her broken marriage. ‘Idiotic. Paul mistook a bit of sparkle for wit. You know’ – not an invitation to dialogue – ‘he even gave the woman a “baroque sensibility”. Shit.’ She yawns as if a flower is opening inside her mouth. ‘Really!’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘OK, I looked at his emails.’

  Annie’s bleak expression is comically at odds with her mascaraed lashes, bright lips and pink and black hat. ‘Someone told her she had “a happy heart”. Why would she repeat it? What narcissism.’

  ‘Don’t let it travel,’ says Fran.

  Annie stares. ‘Not so easy.’

  ‘Of course. Feels like a morass. But the “happy heart” thing’s just pre-formed language, you know it.’

  ‘Maybe, but impossible to erase.’

  Notwithstanding ambivalence around Anne Elliot and Fanny Price – would they, wouldn’t they accept Another? – Jane Austen doesn’t propose a second attachment for Annie. Courting men of a certain age – and, despite Marianne Dashwood’s sixteen-year-old perception, this isn’t thirty-five – don’t always explain their ailments, their hernias, goitres and prostates, their fear
of an empty kitchen.

  ‘Oh well,’ says Fran, ‘borrow skates and scoot along.’

  She speaks quickly to avoid being ventriloquized by Jane Austen who’s urging patience and hope: how much may a few months do?

  ‘Imagine cooking and eating it on toast.’

  Fran spies an olive-coloured young woman talking excitedly to two girls. She wears tight jeans and bright white trainers, a red sweater slung over one shoulder below a long head and slanted neck. Fran imagines her in shiny silver high heels and gold Beauty-Queen swimsuit (pre-1970), then berates herself for so banal an image. Two young men stop by as the girls saunter off. The olive woman keeps talking, gesticulating with long-fingered hands, then throws back her head of stiff massed hair in merriment.

  Annie follows Fran’s eyes. ‘It’s Tamsin,’ she says, waving. With qualifications in diasporic, post-colonial and global literature, she’s become Annie’s (temporary) colleague in both Department and College. She swims in warm intellectual waters in a way impossible for the soon-to-be-pensioned-off.

  Always so.

  Fran frowns as Tamsin strolls over. Lovely, she thinks but ‘pert’, a word fallen from currency, along with ‘forthright’.

  ‘You two look like a literary graveyard,’ chuckles the young woman, swinging her slim legs over a bench to the side of Fran and Annie.

  Fran whispers loudly to Annie, ‘She’s thinking we’ve been locked out of life.’

  ‘Do you know what Tamsin once said?’ Annie gives her a teasing smile. ‘“I don’t want to be old. I couldn’t bear it.”’

  Surely Annie must have taken this as a compliment? Though a handsome face makes insolence charming.

  The long neck and heavy black hair remind Fran of an elegant praying mantis or a dark bewigged flamingo. ‘You want to be just as you are all your life?’ she asks. ‘I’m Fran by the way.’

  ‘Well yes,’ says Tamsin. ‘I’m Tamsin by the way.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t be you if you had a wrinkly face and drooping eyelids?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘If you were like us?’ pursues Fran.

  ‘Oh,’ says Tamsin.

  Fran smiles to see she’s not retreating.

  Then Tamsin says – as if studying a talking bear, thinks Fran – ‘What’s it like being old? I guess your minds are firmed.’

  ‘We don’t know,’ says Annie quickly, seeing the question directed at Fran. She recalls the encounter in the Three Geese. ‘No one does. Do sit down Tamsin. I’ll get you a drink. Coke?’

  While Annie’s away, Fran studies her companion. The startling eyes move up, down and sideways, cinema-celebrity-wise. Are they dark brown or hazel? Green lights glint like marbles. Gauzy white sleeves invade the hands when her prehensile fingers gesture down. Something hippy, something dippy, something Pre-Raphaelite. Fran wishes she’d had a daughter, been the mother of this young woman. As well as of dear Johnnie, not instead.

  Rachel interrupts the silence. She takes the last free stool, smiling her easy smile. ‘Hi,’ she says. Fran grins back. Rachel pulls out her mobile phone, deletes a couple of texts, then gets up to seek Annie at the bar. Fran urges herself to speak before Tamsin finds the phone for which she’s rooting in her canvas bag. ‘What are you working on?’

  ‘My PhD was on ecofeminist criticism using BAME writers. I’m like getting it ready for publication while doing new stuff.’

  Fran has an image of Tamsin – truly a very pretty girl – crawling in the long grass by a swift river’s edge searching for dark crawling words in the undergrowth.

  ‘Is there much call for it?’

  Tamsin laughs. ‘For apocalypse, the eco end-time? Absolutely. I’ve taken a creative-writing course. I’m aiming for a wider market.’

  ‘Wider than?’

  Tamsin smirks but doesn’t answer. She takes out her cigarettes. ‘Do you mind?’

  Fran does mind but says no. ‘Not so many people smoke nowadays. Just about everyone who wanted to appear arty or intellectual did when I was young.’

  ‘It’s literary homage to Zora Neale Hurston,’ grins Tamsin.

  Annie returns with Rachel. Fran likes Rachel, though Rachel’s unsure what to make of this provincial friend of clever Annie’s; as a result, she’s cautious. Annie carries a small tin tray of coke, beer and two more gins – Fran hopes they’re singles.

  Tamsin and Rachel chat about creative-writing courses. Annie checks her irritation. The effort amuses Fran, for even she can tell the future’s with Rachel’s trade, not the Enlightenment Prose Annie peddles to dwindling students. From retirement, she feels benign towards changes passing her by like an empty train viewed from the stillness of a country platform.

  Not radical changes, actually: in 1891 New Grub Street described the industry of literature, the networking, marketing and dumbing-down needed for success. One character understood the modern reader’s diminishing attention: it can’t be held beyond two inches (they speak of space, we of time, but the point’s the same). He proposes to teach novel-writing in ten lessons.

  ‘Self-expression stinks,’ says Annie, intending to provoke with her hobbyhorse. She waves her Gauloises in the air.

  That year in France has much to answer for, thinks Fran as the heavy smoke assaults her lungs.

  ‘Sure, if we tried to write ourselves,’ says Rachel. ‘We write from, not of, ourselves.’

  ‘I suppose people express memories to expel them.’

  ‘Can’t see that working,’ says Fran. ‘Memories go underground. If you pull them up directly, you leave bits inside.’

  ‘Oh, man,’ laughs Tamsin swirling her tongue round the top of her empty glass. ‘You sound like you speak from experience.’

  ‘Ignore her,’ laughs Annie, ‘she lives alone. She’s obsessed with …’ Fran’s heart leaps towards her mouth – subsiding as Annie concludes, ‘a peasant woman from Siberia called Agafia. She exists totally isolate. Or rather she now, I suspect, lodges with Fran though she doesn’t know it, the peasant that is.’

  ‘I quite enjoy reading people’s lives,’ says Tamsin, ‘though many are, like, so totally predictable.’

  Annie turns to Fran. ‘Remember Geraldine, the waiflike woman who works on Anglo-Saxon cooking and looks like a Kate Greenaway child? – she says her imaginary friend’s the Queen. The Queen! She visualises HM in different hats, her stony not smiley face, large empty handbag dangling.’

  ‘Was she serious?’ asks Fran.

  ‘Dunno, guess you could do worse. The image might be calming – if you ignore the dreadful family.’

  ‘No one’s immune to fantasy friends,’ says Rachel gulping her beer. She feels hearty beside these gin- and coke-drinkers.

  Annie stubs out her cigarette. One fewer pollutant. ‘To answer your question, Tamsin, about what old age feels like, since I’m the only one here with experience – though experience is much despised – I should say the transition from youth to age doesn’t happen. The early self-image sticks around however pushy the new one. You forget you’re old. Clear mirrors feel like someone else’s photos.’ She pauses, then adds, ‘I think old age is being open, not firmed, mind still on fire, less roaring perhaps.’

  ‘You’re like saying you distance yourself from old age and stay twenty-three?’

  Before she can mention the body’s debility preventing such manoeuvre, Fran senses rising damp from the wooden stool. It adds to the discomfort of the smoky air. She should carry a cushion for separating her buttocks from the world.

  Jane Austen pops over to claim the elderly thought. One of my most sensible but underwritten characters warned her daughter of physical not emotional hazards. Wrap up around the throat when leaving a public place, Mrs Morland tells Catherine en route to wicked Bath. Who could counsel better?

  Mum warned never to show the top of one’s arms or neck. Even a turkey is improved by a silk polka-dot scarf, Fran returns.

  Thomas Ashe strolls along carrying a pint of Old Speckled Hen in a tall glass. He stops
by Annie, smiles, then glances at Tamsin. ‘I like the lad,’ Annie’d said. ‘Maybe a bit conceited. He’s married an elegant Indian of such fertility – though that was his fault too – in so many years they’ve had three infants.’

  ‘May I?’ Thomas nods, then sits on the bench next to Tamsin. He looks round her to greet Rachel whom he courts. He thinks she might have influence in American universities when he needs, as he surely will, to join one for fame and fortune.

  Fran gazes at Thomas. Here it is: that moment when the stranger enters the slumbering place and the plot begins – or at least a little mental snap and crackling.

  Something to remember, like the first meeting with Annie on the park bench in Christ’s Pieces when the public toilets were locked.

  Sebald in Southwold.

  Shelley spying Mary Godwin in Skinner Street.

  Darcy snubbing Lizzie Bennet in Meryton.

  5

  If there’s a young person in possession of some learning who doesn’t want to display himself, Jane Austen mutters in Fran’s ear, I do not wish to know him.

  Tamsin is in love. Had Fran entered her head just then, she’d have told her what being old is like. Not the lightning fall into love – or lust – but its almost simultaneous flickering.

  Thomas glances round, then catches Annie’s encouraging smile.

  ‘We’re discussing self-expression,’ she says.

  ‘I’m interested in looking from outside,’ Thomas announces. ‘Seeing beyond your own body and mind was what Shelley …’ ‘A Shelley-free day,’ interrupts Annie, ‘but go on.’

  ‘Well, it’s a human urge not just to express yourself but to see the self from somewhere else, almost as someone else. OK, forget Shelley, but Milton, Kant …’

  ‘Kant-free day,’ giggles Tamsin. ‘Kant was a white supremacist.’ Her deep-hazel eyes fix sideways on Thomas. She moves her glass as if sloshing coke, though none is left.

  Rachel’s sorry to lose Shelley. Appallingly self-involved – aren’t geniuses always so? But she likes his multi-coloured visions, his foiled yearning for community. Most of the time she hides her liking beneath interest in Mary, whose novels, including cried-up Frankenstein, leave her stone cold. Cultural fashion’s tyrannical.