Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  Fran hasn’t listened.

  Llandrindod-Wells, a mushroom town in the soft green grass of Wales, is not a million miles from speculative Sanditon. Living in a literary fragment, however, Sanditon avoids the shabby fate of the real spa which millennium funds have not quite rescued. (With a habit of reading words awry, Fran had first seen ‘millenarian’ on the fading notice tacked to a broken glass pavilion: for an instant she’d thought that, yes, something like the apocalyptic prophetess Joanna Southcott or the celestial king Shiloh from her loins would miraculously put the town back square on the cure-all map.)

  She falls silent, tasting in her mouth the sulphurous waters from the chained municipal cup Dad held out to her and Mum … she swishes her tongue over her upper teeth furred by coffee. ‘I wrote to Melvyn Bragg’s Radio 4 programme In Our Time,’ she concludes, ‘suggesting the topic of “chalybeate springs” to the producer. They could use German historians and chemists, and me – possibly. I had an acknowledgement.’

  Rachel glances at Fran. What’s her tone? And the unopened notepad? Does her new friend write or want to? Is this pad a hint? She recollects the list of Annie’s qualities, including the incongruous ‘lack of modesty’. Is Fran hampered by too much, so that she depends on encouragement she never quite demands? In one of her own short stories, a nervous Sarah Lawrence girl is reluctant to show … Rachel pulls herself back as the bill arrives.

  They walk along Trinity Street, noting a new posh restaurant. A homeless man with bulging backpack twists unsteadily, belligerently sticking out his jaw and shouting curses from a little mouth nestling inside a dirty beard. He directs them to the low grey sky, perhaps smelling rain and knowing its ache. Circling in the same spot, he’s a parody of the student backpacker. Fran approaches to speak. ‘Gissa,’ and ‘Fuck off,’ she thinks he says.

  ‘Yeah, cool,’ says Rachel. ‘I wouldn’t try to engage. We don’t in New York. I wonder what could assuage his anger.’

  ‘Defiling snobby colleges and heritage tea shops, setting the whole pile ablaze?’

  ‘Would he be happy then?’

  ‘Maybe. He’d have disrupted civic order. Enough?’

  ‘’Course not. What a fraud he’d be if anything was enough.’

  8

  Fran isn’t leaving till after lunch but likes to anticipate. It takes her only a few minutes to grab her things from the gold Victorian hooks on the bedroom door and stuff them into her bag, longer to search repeatedly under pillows, in drawers and beside the taps in the bathroom. Despite such care, she often leaves something behind, a toothbrush, a comb, once a pair of knickers drying on a radiator. Angling for another invitation?

  She’s bought a second-hand copy of Shelley selections. She intends to study it before the trip, hoping to rekindle some of the adolescent enthusiasm she must once have had: there’s a memory of reading aloud to Dad a poem about Euganean Hills, wherever they are. She doesn’t recall much of Shelley’s life except his fucking Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter on the St Pancras grave.

  Annie’s making a ham sandwich on sourdough for their last lunch, adding Provolone, rocket, parsley, thyme and a little onion. ‘I can help you sort out and present the cottage,’ she says suddenly. ‘If you really want to sell.’

  ‘Dunno. Country round Saxtham isn’t desirable except to sugar-beet and turnip growers, so no rich person will want the place as second home. But I’ve come to like the flat land and huge sky. The trees tower against it: like hills, one has to look up,’ she shrugs. ‘Now I wonder if I’d find real hills crowding in. Even the Long Mynd, too claustrophobic perhaps. Where would we’ – she pauses – ‘where would I go?’

  ‘Well you could come here. No hills.’

  Fran imagines living on the edge (all she could afford) of this vain town with its abstracted cyclists, postcard centre and drab suburbs of semis and terraces – its Victoria Park, Victoria Crescent, Victoria Street, Victoria Road, Victoria Row. Funny the Empress of India escapes erasure while her imperial subjects are toppled and defaced. She visualises herself struggling to prise Annie away for a cup of companionable coffee. Annie will be busy with friends or old colleagues, while she, Fran, remains in the margins of lives. ‘There’s a kind of pull from where one grew up,’ she says.

  Annie carries in the plate of sandwiches. ‘Well, London,’ she shrugs, wondering what it feels like to be pulled by even less sophisticated places than Cambridge.

  For Fran the smell of ham brings with it the great fresh honey-coated hams of her childhood: the grocery shop with its counter of crumbly Caerphilly, cured meat, dill pickle like frog’s thighs, and that ham.

  Why is she reticent about this warm and lovely place? Is it the common mockery of the grocer above other trades – Mrs Thatcher, a ‘grocer’s daughter’ – a stain, the ultimate putdown, her predecessor mocked as ‘Grocer Heath’. In New Grub Street an author is writing ‘Mr Bailey. Grocer’. Contemplating this low hero, his friends fall about laughing. Imagine, the hero a grocer! ‘Grocer’ written on her application form to Cambridge which asked what your father did – never mind Mum in her trim clean overall, what exactly does your father do? And nowhere to write, not just any old grocer but a ‘Master Grocer’ who made the best honey-roast hams in Shropshire, in the country. She loved that man and wishes he would walk into the room so she could say so and no longer wince at his accent. Her eyes feel teary.

  The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past: no wonder the secret escapes the unsympathizing observer.

  Surprised, Fran sniffs back tears. Where’d you say that?

  I didn’t, says Jane Austen, I quote a successor. I do not write the lachrymose novel.

  You’ve swum down the gutter of time? Or sauntered beside its flow.

  Annie lets the quiet dawdle.

  ‘I couldn’t move here,’ says Fran finally.

  Catching her friend’s thoughts, Annie responds, ‘You’re making too much of discrimination and disdain. I’m as out of touch as you with wokeness and no-platforming and all the stuff you’ve no doubt been reading. Fran, you don’t have to be excluded unless you exclude yourself, here or anywhere else.’

  How easy it is to be hoodwinked, remarks Jane Austen.

  She’s arranged to meet Thomas near the station. Since she’s carrying her Cath Kidston bag, they’ve chosen a chain with wide doors. Fran usually boycotts such places because their toilets require a code: more than an inconvenience to the needy public. Now she’s stopped working, she makes her own coffee with funnels, paper and hot water. Messy, wasteful and pleasing.

  ‘Are you haunted by Shelley?’ she asks over the coffee – and two croissants. She’d bought them to sop up the diuretic liquid before a train ride. Thomas doesn’t eat buttery croissants, but he shreds his on the plate to be polite.

  ‘I love his words, I guess.’

  ‘But the man Shelley?’

  ‘Well, he is wonderful. A kind of holy innocent, Akhnaten in Philip Glass’s opera, asexual and sexual, neither exactly.’

  ‘You mean he’s not your type?’ Cruder than she’d intended.

  Thomas laughs, ‘He’s beyond me.’

  ‘It’s a long way to mid-Wales.’ Fran worries Thomas might have cold feet. To prevent his saying so, she adds, ‘Do you know the M6 toll road was built on two and a half million unsold copies of Mills and Boon books shredded and mixed with tarmac and asphalt.’

  ‘Best thing for Mills and Boon.’

  ‘Think of everyone riding over unseen, unread words.’

  ‘I have a fast car.’

  So, they would go. Fran gives a half-pleading, quarter-worried glance towards the café door. As it happens, Jane Austen is looking out, her ramrod back turned inwards. Bonnet ribbons gently flap in the draft created by each entrant. The air is warmish before rain, so it’s no great matter. No one will catch cold.

  She will want to stay behind, Fran supposes. What did Jane Austen understand of utopia or bliss in wild
solitude? All families and shrubberies with her, nature in clothes.

  As she walks across the new central space to the station dodging taxis, she remarks, you know your William Gilpin was in Elan Valley? He found the country growing mountainous and ‘dis-proportioned’ – too much mountain for too little water. Different now.

  As you suppose, murmurs Jane Austen, I don’t care for nature without method. Except the sea, the sea …

  Fran’s mind fills with the smooth hills round the swollen rivers of Elan and Claerwen. Agafia could have lived there. She’d have caught fish, trapped rabbits. There are always rabbits.

  She stands on the platform of the ugly station. Rain begins, so she enters a waiting-room beside a coffee kiosk, choosing the seat closest to the window. Its table is littered with debris of plastic cups and chocolate wrappings. Inhaling the muggy air, she thinks how much healthier to sit outside and get wet. She stays in, listening to the acrimonious rain hitting the window. Raymond Briggs thanked God it fell on the roof, not on him. She smiles thinking of the old curmudgeon.

  Water, wrote a Frenchman, is the key to understanding social progress. Whose is the water? Who owns the falling rain, the sodden clouds? It’s a man thing, this urge to possess.

  The capture of rain for great reservoirs, the enclosing of water – someone else’s water if we talk possession – is the great sign of nineteenth-century progress, the modern world’s biggest triumph in the age-old battle of man and nature. How, thinks Fran, will Thomas, Rachel and, improbably, Jane Austen, respond to the great reservoirs of Elan Valley, half nature, half human cruelty?

  Think what we do to water: catch it, trap it, doctor it, dose it out of nature, squash it through filter beds and pipes, imprison it in tanks far from where it fell, expecting, as well it might, a quiet life of metamorphosis, a gentle sinking to earth. We humiliate it in sprinkling systems and ‘features’ by fishing gnomes or frilly plants; we fill baths, over and over, carting off the dirt and filth of humans who, despising its weakness, add fizz to posh bottles from fake springs. Water, a commodity, a demand, a money thing, a slave. How could it stand against all that irrepressible damming energy? Nothing like it in the world since Romans carved highways through Eurasia.

  Fran almost misses her train, forgetting she must hurry over a footbridge to a new platform that wasn’t there in her time.

  Part Two

  9

  ‘Have I eaten Mary?’ Percy Bysshe Shelley asks. Only the author of Frankenstein can answer him. (To Fran’s – but not Rachel’s – surprise, she’s now the prime owner of the Shelley name.)

  Thomas quotes the question because for him it expresses the joy of a young gifted pair becoming one entity. An anti-dote perhaps to whatever Fran, Rachel – and he? – will think of utopian communes in wet Wales. The unanswered question lodges in Fran’s mind.

  You never had a brother, Jane Austen reminds her. You missed learning early of male self-absorption.

  Thomas motors along the A44 on the last lap of his journey, his expensive mountain bike fastened to a back-rack of his Land Rover Discovery. Escapist joy grips him like a second seatbelt. With a few hiccups – errors on his Sat-Nav, insouciant container lorries, slow elderly drivers propped on cushions – he’s reached the B&B on the edge of Rhayader near midday. It’s dismal and overstuffed. He made the booking, so has no one else to blame. ‘Some sort of show on, so nowhere much was free.’

  ‘Imagine!’ says Annie when she hears – Annie who thinks everywhere beyond London and Cambridge a desert. ‘Something happening!’

  The women arrive shortly after in a small hired Vauxhall. Fran is driving. She took over when Rachel, who’s paid for the hire, swerved out of a side road into the righthand lane beside Doldowlod. Nobody was coming, but still.

  Fran enters her bedroom, the smallest though each pays the same. Being first there, Thomas moved his backpack and holdall into the largest. Realising the imbalance as he helps the women up the stairs with their things, he offers to change places. Rachel and Fran refuse.

  Following behind him, Fran again admires his fine physique, the tallness so important in civilised life – easier to find jobs and mates apparently. People like seeing the strong prey on the weak, all history shows it. Someone claimed a lion hunting a flock of sheep is more poetical than the sheep. Yet, don’t we identify with the underdog?

  She feels no envy for the strong and tall, has no desire to cross sex and be a man – though she might enjoy transitioning species: she’d do well as a woolly munching sheep, even hunted by lions. Since they bring on sleep, sheep must sleep serenely.

  She unpacks her few things onto a side chair, hanging nothing in the elderly freestanding wardrobe. She’s tired; she and Rachel have had to set out far too early. Dissatisfied as well – she’s talked too much, feeding her companion indigestible facts and opinions.

  Would Jane Austen inspire Austenolatry had she let Sir Thomas Bertram drone on about slavery in Mansfield Park? If he’d done so, he might have revealed what is most probable, that he was an ameliorist – like her father. An unacceptable position now we see the delicate negotiations of the past in the most lurid light.

  Fran surveys herself in the mottled mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. Who are you? she says. The mirror image smirks.

  Though eccentric, the action improves on her habit of staring at Cassandra’s crude sketch so fixedly that the aslant eyes swivel to catch hers. That really is naughty.

  She grins, sensing that, despite her doubts, Jane Austen has come. She’ll not have heard Fran’s thoughts on slavery – or she’d certainly have mounted her high horse – and she’ll probably not sit on the ground as at the seaside (letting her back be so thrillingly water-coloured by her sister). But you can be sure of nothing.

  What are men to rocks and mountains? says Lizzie Bennet, heading for the barren Lake District. She’s waylaid by the romantic plot, some strategy – and that luck. But she might have gone.

  Do you go to a place or does the place come to you?

  Jane Austen’s busy climbing into the wardrobe ignoring its mirrored door. There are moments when Fran is defiantly angry with the Author and her free indirect manner. Such an easy way to watch others deceive themselves. For now, she simply feels deflated by this quick removal.

  Until she thinks: Jane Austen, the Witch in the Wardrobe.

  ‘I didn’t really appreciate it was just a reservoir,’ says Rachel as they meet for a night-cap, ‘I sort of imagined a lake.’

  Fran can’t believe this. If Shelley’s house is submerged, it couldn’t have jumped into water and sunk, could it?

  Still, Rachel’s game for anything. As she says to Miranda back in New York before her signal dies, ‘I kind of like it here. Could settle.’ Miranda misses the pivotal remark since her seven-year-old son is squawking for full attention – as he always does if anyone tries to share it.

  ‘Just a reservoir!’ Cofiwch Dryweryn, remember Tryweryn in North Wales. A modest reservoir as reservoirs go, but it became a cause célèbre, the sign of high victimhood. Aren’t we all vying for that?

  Cofiwch Dryweryn scrawled on a boulder, vandalised – then, like baby dragons from buried teeth, springing up over rocks and walls.

  Capel Celyn, the hamlet (only forty-eight souls and none dead) was drowned for Liverpool – we say ‘drowned’, not flooded, more emotive – was Welsh-speaking, and in the 1960s the dying of the Welsh language was a potent fear.

  ‘The Welsh do victim in different voices,’ said Annie to this news. She can make such remarks knowing that, for victimhood, Jews top everyone, even descendants of slaves.

  The Hull poet Philip Larkin, who really might have been Welsh such a temperament he had in him, said deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

  ‘R.S. Thomas has a poem about it.’

  ‘Who? About what?’ asks Rachel, who’s considering the different types of Cambridge houses on offer – if she were, just possibly, to relocate. She’d want more than
an extended bijoux box.

  ‘Reservoirs. He said reservoirs are the subconscious of a people.’

  ‘Why not the London Tube?’

  ‘He called their beauty a performance for strangers.’

  ‘Sounds Luddite,’ chuckles Rachel.

  ‘He was a little OTT,’ agrees Fran, ‘he smelt putrefaction. The English were scavenging among the remains of our culture, he thought.’

  ‘What an apocalyptic guy – must introduce him to Tamsin.’

  ‘It gets worse. He wanted the English wiped out of Wales – imagine if he’d said Muslims or Blacks.’

  ‘Don’t let’s,’ says Rachel. ‘You admire this guy, Fran?’

  ‘Sort of. A misfit lauding a place not quite his. If you listen to him speaking on YouTube, you hear an upper-middle-class Englishman of the past century. He said he’d never have major-poet status because he lacked “love for human beings”.’

  Fran’s glad Jane Austen is in the wardrobe. Loving everybody is hardly the hallmark of genius.

  ‘Liverpool later apologised,’ says Fran. ‘It didn’t return the water.’

  Next morning, she proposes to walk the six miles to Elan Village with Rachel. Though she doesn’t mention it, a purpose is to see her grandfather’s grim stone manse – he so famed for the hwyl that his burial slab is marked ‘powerful in prayer’. As she passes the house now, a shiver of relief runs through her that faith is derelict (mainly) and that she herself has never lived there.

  As one black-stone, slate-roofed house succeeds another, Fran has misgivings about her pedestrian choice. Rachel strides ahead on those bright bouncy trainers Americans wear with every outfit. Such footwear will take her down byways and through any digressions. Fran’s feet are already tiring. Why doesn’t she have shoes like that? Young Johnnie near died of shame when she’d taken him into a shop thirty years back asking for ‘plimsolls’. When did they become trainers?