Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  On the fringe of the Academy, Fran need neither follow fashion nor address the squalors of the past. But Shelley (Percy, that is) hasn’t lately figured in her mind – any more than Kant. ‘Are you describing integrated knowledge, Thomas?’ she asks.

  Surprised, he turns to her, ‘Yeah. People pay it lip service.’ Seeing empty glasses, he knows he should buy a round, but his mind is cantering. Besides, the act could appear too masculine. ‘All knowledge was once connected. Now we use “interdisciplinary” as a magic word. Shelley’s “familiar” …’

  ‘There,’ laughs Annie, ‘You can’t do it. Shelley’s your King Charles’s head.’

  Does she judge her handsome protégé a bit of a windbag and seek to save him? Or is this interchange a little maternally inflected flirtation?

  Eager to get her rump off the damp stool, her lungs from the fug, Fran must leave – but not before contributing. ‘It sounds like a cabbage.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cabbage, pieces of cloth left over after making up suits. They were purloined by tailors, so tailors were nicknamed “cabbages”. To “cabbage” is to pilfer. You can steal or pirate bits of work and thoughts from anywhere. “Interdisciplinarity”, yes?’

  Tamsin removes her eyes from Thomas – so svelte and delectable, must be gay – bi? pan, she hopes. ‘You get it in Mrs Dalloway,’ she says, ‘Toni Morrison.’

  ‘They know these things by instinct in my creative-writing classes,’ remarks Rachel.

  Annie bites her lip. Her glass being empty, she can’t hide the moment with a gulp. She can light another Gauloises, though.

  Momentarily forgetting her intention to leave, Fran jumps in, offering what only Annie will find amusing: ‘I wonder would Jane Austen be employed to teach creative writing? She’s the mother of the snappy opening.’

  ‘Oh, they’ve all learnt that,’ chuckles Rachel. ‘Everyone does brilliant first five pages. Prize judges have to be grabbed by the throat or balls.’

  Jane Austen smiles, knowing her best-selling rival Walter Scott would never have made a ‘Long List’, in fact been unpublishable. My openings are excellent. Perhaps Sense and Sensibility might be …

  The damp stool reasserts itself. Fran stands up stiffly.

  Thomas unfolds his legs from the bench and grabs his empty beer glass. ‘I have to go too, sorry.’ He smiles around, noticing for the first time the amazing vividness of Tamsin’s gold-brown eyes and bronze skin.

  Fran walks towards the market square with Thomas. Years of teaching dozy students have trained her to listen and not listen – as well as talk too much given an opening.

  ‘I guess I do like Shelley’s vision of a world that’s equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,’ remarks Thomas, pleased to have even this antiquated audience.

  Tribeless, nationless, pooh! Your Shelley reminds me of shallow Frank Churchill in my Emma – tired of England before knowing it. Affection begins with one dear spot, a little platoon of family, then circles out to one’s country.

  ‘Mmm,’ says Fran, ‘a bracing idea. There’s a woman in Siberia, Agafia …’

  Before she can continue, Thomas’s mobile phone rings from a pocket in his orange satchel. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes, all good. I’ll call you right back. Love you too.’

  Though the phone’s held near his ear, Fran makes out sharp infant cries and chords of a Mahler symphony.

  ‘Annie tells me you have children.’

  ‘Yes, three girls. Two are twins, not identical but very alike. My wife dresses them the same.’

  Poor animal, murmurs Jane Austen. Child-bearing is merciless.

  ‘How lovely,’ says Fran, wondering why, with little ones and a job in London, Thomas is in Cambridge.

  He excuses himself and goes to untie his bicycle from the railings of a nearby church that explicitly forbids attaching bikes.

  What a handsome man, admires Jane Austen, as a young man ought to be if he possibly can. A little formal, a little priggish, perhaps too thin in the lip.

  Fran shakes her head. A passer-by assumes she’s disrespecting the flowered straw hat she’d worried about wearing; she harrumphs, her face turned towards one of the many windows displaying tourist trinkets.

  Still dawdling, Fran encounters Rachel by a flower stall. She’s buying sweet-smelling freesias. ‘I’m a Shelley devotee too,’ confides Rachel, chuckling, ‘it’s great to find him the icon of the day. We can’t avoid him with Annie’s Thomas.’ She pauses, then continues. ‘Tell me about Annie. I like her very much, something magnetic, I think. But, beyond seeing her bitterness at her break-up, I don’t know much of her life. She quizzes me but gives away little. You are, she’s said, an old friend.’

  ‘Old yes, certainly old.’

  This harping on age irritates Rachel, but she smiles encouragingly.

  ‘She’s what you see. Clever, moody, with guts, without modesty. She’s the daughter of a dominating, critical father and an adoring mother, a potent combination I’d say. Zach Klein was big in Sociology, a Marxist, and sucker for adulation. Probably at the root of Annie’s failed marriage.’

  Oh the inelegancy of summing up a complex friend in simple, fictional terms! But on she goes.

  I interrogate even the most innocent adjective, remarks Jane Austen.

  ‘Annie’s brighter and more successful than Paul was – is – and she put him down in public. Thought him as impervious as she’d like to have been with her dad. I guess she chose him because he didn’t dominate, then felt short-changed he wasn’t successful like Zach, not so sharp – or cruel perhaps. Look, I’m just doing cod psychology.’ Fran should really stop. ‘Paul called her laptop her fetish – she used it even under the duvet in the shared bed. Though maybe she told me this to make herself seem at fault. Better than being a total victim, isn’t it?’

  Standing tall against the sun, Rachel murmurs, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Paul failed to finish a book over many years, did bits of part-time teaching and not much childcare. He used to sit outside cafés reading, sipping coffee, smoking cigars, looking interesting and needy. A young woman with a “happy heart” responded.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something Annie said.’

  Fran’s thankful Jane Austen has wandered off.

  ‘Has it happened to you?’

  Surprised, Rachel replies, ‘Not really. I had a long-term boyfriend and then some.’ She shrugs and falls silent.

  Whimperings, moanings, eyes cried out on the carpet. Goodness! How one debases oneself at such times. An old, old story, a shingle beach not stonier, migraine not more searing. Fran grows sad. ‘I guess men always think they can go cleanly. Demand dignity in a whirlpool! Annie has pride, it’s carried her through. She’s wonderful,’ she adds knowing enthusiasm overdue. ‘She’ll be more splendid without Paul. One day.’

  Rachel blushes for Fran and says, ‘Yes. I’m sure she’ll soon be in a good place, if she isn’t already.’

  A cliché too far.

  On her way home to Saxtham on Friday evening, Fran might stop to buy a Chelsea bun, its sweet perfume breathing into the car’s air.

  You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge cake is to me, smiles Jane Austen. I never underestimate the importance of syllabubs and jelly.

  The bun signifies weekend: next day Fran may walk with a friend or see a film, though she dislikes getting home late – or be alone. But aloneness isn’t the mode round Annie. Does she ever travel with the poet Elizabeth Bishop towards solitude, ‘the wide, quiet plane with different lights in the sky and different, more secret sounds’? Here in Cambridge they chatter and click in libraries and coffee bars as if silence were a corrosive disease: meeting, greeting, leaving and meeting again, on and on.

  Don’t be such a curmudgeon, mutters Jane Austen.

  ‘Come visit my place,’ Rachel says to Fran, who’s made jokes about her septic tank and crooked stairways. ‘This evening?’

  Their eyes make contact. Oculesics, thinks Fran. Rachel look
s down and smiles. ‘Must get off before my flowers wilt.’

  6

  Entering the house, Fran and Annie embrace Rachel in the way now common between women. Fran worries how many times to offer a cheek. Over her shoulder she notes Rachel’s appraising eye on Annie’s clashing orange, red and blue blouse beneath the shiny black jacket and jaunty canvas hat. To Fran it’s all Annie.

  Sensing her appraisal intercepted, Rachel says, ‘You know, I once wrote a piece for the New York Times on costume, the way it gives us our sense of our bodies. It controls how we move and relate to the world.’

  ‘Was it about sex?’ asks Annie. She has no problem with Rachel’s attitude to her style.

  ‘Sort of. Dress makes people.’

  Fran rolls her eyes.

  ‘Nothing’s natural. The wearer provoking a sexy response feels the whale bones cupping her breasts, making them nestle so prettily in satin pouches instead of flopping free. Like using the skinny bikini to frame bare flesh. Structure to keep the mind on its toes. Everything talks: scarf, gaudy shirt, thong underwear, jump suit, everything.’ Rachel finishes with a grin.

  Fran looks towards Jane Austen, expecting a quiet sneer. She’s disappointed.

  None of my characters goes naked. I never thought dress a frivolous distinction.

  Oh fine!

  Rachel judges Fran unassuming and prickly, an awkward combination, not uncommon in England. ‘I’ll show you round when we’ve had a drink,’ she says from behind the counter in the open-plan living space. She’s expertly opening the Veuve Clicquot so that its cork does not, as with unpractised Fran, fly off through a window or into the fireplace. ‘I’ve never lived anywhere like it. Sort of a doll’s house. Guys in Manhattan do amazing things with fractions of a loft but, Jesus! this beats everything. I guess it’s the steep house prices.’

  ‘Yup,’ says Annie. She’s lavished time and money on her artisan terraced home which would, in a cheap unemployed town, have collapsed or been bulldozed. Here it’s prized for old iron fireplaces and industrial mouldings. The high value will enrich the Rat when she buys him out.

  ‘You can’t nail bookshelves to wattle walls without pulling the whole place down,’ Fran remarks.

  ‘Something magical about this secret life of houses,’ Rachel’s saying, ‘closets turn into bedrooms, cubicles studies. There’s a restroom under the stairs, really a broom cupboard, awesome? My neighbour’s house is a shoe box till you go towards the kitchen. Then it flaps open like an origami flower. When I moved in here, the wife’s sister-in-law showed me the wonders like a little girl displaying her toys. So cute.’

  The champagne arrives in tinted flutes. Feeling a bubbly contentment after gulping it down, Fran twirls the slender stem. She gets up and walks towards the window by the vase of freesias. It looks onto a small formal garden of box hedges and white gravel.

  ‘A gardener from Harley College fixes it once a week, back and front, just a few square inches.’ Rachel laughs.

  Small but labour-intensive thinks Fran. ‘A bit feudal.’

  Why are they talking houses? wonders Annie. Are they going through a phase? Like thirty years back when you worried whether to buy and then produce kids. Should you, shouldn’t you? When? Why?

  As she and Annie stroll home, Annie remarks, ‘You overdid it. Saying the place was “exquisite”.’

  ‘I adopted the word from that excruciating dinner at your College. You think it a word above my station?’

  ‘Well, you excelled yourself,’ Annie chuckles. ‘You talked about a bathroom in the clouds.’

  ‘I try to please.’

  ‘At least you didn’t indulge your overwhelming need to offend. I’ve seen you do that here.’ Annie grins and squeezes her arm.

  Fran likes the remark, it makes social failure intentional. As it usually is, in a way, though, when it happens, it doesn’t stop her wanting to send a mitigating postcard next morning alerting the recipient to what she – usually she – has long forgotten.

  The anxieties of common life, says Jane Austen.

  Fran and Annie walk along uneven pavements. Dug up for pipes and wires, to Fran they resemble rutted country paths; she stumbles once or twice before settling her eyes on her feet.

  A bullet bicycle whizzes past. Annie hardly registers it. Death, thinks Fran, ridden into darkness.

  ‘Rachel’s borrowing the house,’ Annie says. ‘The owner’s English, teaches in Princeton.’ She pauses, Fran keeps her eyes down. ‘I know you think everyone round here’s privileged. Some are, but most are like me.’

  Fran represses a grin. A father with best-selling books on Nazis and Weimar, lead articles in every American intellectual periodical, which prized his assured Jewish-English voice – still Zach Klein hadn’t provided his metropolitan-raised, privately educated children with ‘privilege’? Really, thinks Fran, really!

  ‘Nice,’ she says, ‘Rachel’s nice.’

  In theory Annie wants her friends to like each other. A slight chill touches her when they do.

  She’s invited Rachel for dinner at the weekend. It consists of French hare-and-orange paté from the fancy delicatessen in the Row, pasta Venetian style, salad of green beans, feta cheese, olives and avocado with strawberry dressing, and dessert of French-pear tart with Chantilly cream. Mostly pre-prepared and easy to serve.

  Fran thinks back to the pheasant and parsnips in the cottage, the mound of greasy washing-up. If she ever entertains again, she must remember this expensive, effortless menu. Just end with a choice of Fourme d’Ambert and goat’s cheese, plus a platter of colour-coded fruit.

  Fruit, says Jane Austen, is the very thing on hats. Strawberries, grapes, cherries, plums, apricots, greengages; almonds, raisins and tamarinds might also … her words trail off.

  Flowers are very much worn, Fran mutters back as Rachel arrives bearing a bunch of peonies.

  ‘I know that recipe,’ she exclaims. ‘I smell onions, capers and balsamic vinegar. Italy.’

  ‘Sultanas, pine nuts and spinach too,’ Annie sings out.

  Fran smiles: how little it takes to cheer Annie when she forgets the Rat!

  The disposition to be comforted … begins Jane Austen.

  Annie loves preparing food, relishing the sense of transitory control. Then in the last stages she grows anxious. Is she haunted by Virginia Woolf ‘s Mrs Ramsay and her boeuf en daube or Sadie, who never quite pleased Zach when entertaining his Marxist chums in the too grand dining-room in Chalcot Square?

  Cooking’s the youth of the dish, she thinks, the eating its staid middle period, seconds its insipid old age.

  Fran hasn’t registered a fourth place-setting, so she’s surprised when Thomas arrives just as the three women are about to sit down. While he goes to the kitchen to deposit his bottle of wine, Annie whispers, ‘He’s on his own here. Family’s in London.’

  To her surprise, Fran feels disapproving.

  Perhaps this single male presence keeps talk general. Thomas deploys the word ‘feminism’ as if delicately saying ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’, unable to stop himself but eager never to offend.

  ‘We’re Second Wave,’ says Fran, ‘you know, give us a job, abortions, equal pay. Hairy legs and no lipstick, aggressive like men, all very heady.’

  Annie smiles on her friend. ‘Fran’s still riding the Wave on her little skateboard.’

  ‘Why not? There’s residue from any revolution.’

  ‘There always will be,’ says Thomas grinning, ‘until we get a non-binary, ungendered society.’ He turns to Rachel, ‘Have you read Shelley on Charlotte Corday? No, well, she was attacked as unfeminine for her murder of bloodthirsty Marat. The autopsy pronounced her a virgin, so she couldn’t be a whore; the revolutionaries charged her with failing in feminine sensibility. Shelley understood her violence was natural.’

  Annie swivels her eyes to Rachel, who smiles at Thomas.

  ‘He makes Charlotte Corday a whole human being, you see, ungendered.’

  Fortunately, Jane Auste
n is absent, or Fran would have had to interrupt this tosh. What is ‘a woman’ in or out of the ‘great glazed tank of art’?

  ‘Olympe de Gouges, author of The Declaration of Women’s Rights, also had her private parts inspected before her head was detached.’

  Annie’s busy urging second helpings of pasta and worrying that the tarte bourdaloue is too small for the company.

  The talk disturbs Rachel. All men want to kill a woman in fact or fantasy. To quash the thought, she says, ‘Shelley seems to think anything densely emotional is good. To me, violence in art exists to entertain. True in life, sometimes.’

  ‘I suppose,’ says Fran, evading Rachel’s disturbance – ‘the most violent act is death. Since there’s so much talk now about life-affirming, do you think there might be death-affirming? It’s a pretty majestic thing.’

  Thomas turns to her, ‘No, I don’t. Children make the difference between thinking of life or death.’

  ‘If it weren’t for children, I’d be dancing,’ says Rachel.

  This makes no sense to Fran: is the tone bleak or genial?

  ‘Parenthood isn’t always life-affirming,’ says Annie. ‘Mothers force clitoridectomy and stunted feet on kids, African men push their infants away so they can suckle the women’s full breasts.’

  ‘Daughtering can be cruel too,’ says Fran.

  Not my subject, intrudes Jane Austen. I preferred the cool love of sisters.

  Shush, says Fran, not everyone thinks it was cool.

  ‘You can’t be good enough at life, at anything, without loving,’ says Rachel, throwing off her mood.

  ‘Even mothering?’ asks Fran.

  ‘Sometimes I think I’ve married, procreated, thought, published, everything, all through its power,’ says Thomas looking into his empty glass.

  Annie reaches for the opened bottle and pours him more red wine.