Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  Rachel shrugs, ‘He was all light – light moves fast, is never fixed.’

  Yet, the young couple are happy. Shelley’s sincere in his desire to make Nantgwyllt their home. It’s poetry, inspiration, muse, and would-be rapture.

  In the tundra Agafia still awaits her Rapture, struggling, starving, praying, always on the edge of eternity.

  Shelley and Agafia, two sides of a coin.

  ‘The rapture was presumably down to Harriet,’ adds Rachel. ‘But no place can compete with heaven. Shelley may try but Elan Valley won’t be Eden; it must fail. Like Harriet.

  Fran is picking her nose, a habit indulged in the cottage; she stops as the others glance at her, then moves her finger against her cheek pensively. She feels the discomfort of the rock prodding her buttocks.

  ‘The poetry he writes here is intemperate, but temperance isn’t Shelley’s style. It’s unstable, but so’s time. He says he wants a glass eye, a steel hand and a soul not formed to feel. But he feels with every fibre of his being.’

  Fran’s glad Jane Austen is off walking somewhere. This kind of talk lacks the wryness for which she’s so renowned.

  Exactly, says the Author from far away, I am very fond of a long walk. Wordsworth and I find it useful for ordering narrative.

  Thomas stands up. He’s growing weary of what he calls (privately) this ‘silver cynicism’. He wants to mount his bike again and race like lightening up and down hills as Shelley dreamt of speeding his body and words across oceans.

  But he wills himself to listen to Rachel. She may not be the key to America, yet she’ll have influence. Besides, he likes her. Not far from his mother’s age – though light years from her clinging garrulity. Less sharp-tongued than Annie.

  As usual, there are money problems. Shelley’s still a minor. His furious father and sympathetic cousins withhold a loan, none liking his social schemes. Political rumblings too: a private box of papers sent from Ireland is opened in Holyhead and judged seditious. Money dries up.

  So, miserably for his poetic enthusiasm and plans for utopia, Shelley must leave the gloomy, roomy house of Nantgwyllt. After all that bother of moving.

  ‘That’s it,’ says Rachel, ‘end of story! Still, the perishing firefly might enjoy a longer life than the tortoise.’

  Only a fool fails to secure money before marriage or removal, snaps Jane Austen.

  ‘It couldn’t have worked,’ says Fran, stretching stiff ankles, ‘that belief in possibilities outside the real world. Shelley creates a cosmic drama and, though he says he wants to make things better here, now, his surreal vision would always spoil it.’

  Thomas shrugs. ‘His goals were beyond families and society. Transcendence is about raising up the individual.’

  ‘You do know, Thomas,’ grins Rachel, ‘that Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock imagines him the author of a work called Philosophical Gas?’

  12

  For some deflated days Shelley and Harriet stay at Cwm Elan with the Groves, then they leave Elan Valley for good.

  Rachel chuckles. ‘We’ve travelled a long way to reflect on a few drafty, dreamy weeks.’

  ‘Intense though,’ replies Fran, trawling her eyes over the hills. Her companions regard each other as they walk on chatting.

  Next year Harriet bears a daughter, named Ianthe after the Fairy’s tutee in Queen Mab. So young and inexperienced, she leans even more on her forceful elder sister.

  Bad move: men never like it – the older sister, best friend, mother-in-law.

  ‘So much to process,’ remarks Thomas flexing his left hand as if pushing aside heavy words.

  Soon Shelley comes to loathe the sister and, where he loathes, he’s cruel. Bewildered by his swings of mood, poor Harriet falls to reading the lovely dedication to Queen Mab, heeding old words instead of present angry looks.

  ‘It’s hard to believe someone once trusted has changed,’ ends Rachel turning to Fran, her voice muted; ‘takes time for the mind to catch up with the senses.’

  Harriet is persuaded not to breastfeed, a common route for genteel ladies. So, little Ianthe sucks on a wet-nurse. Shelley is outraged: alien milk will infect his child.

  Through the ages Christian artists have found breastfeeding picturesque, erotic, intellectually interesting, the suckling of God. Shelley? Well, nipples enthralled him – or he wouldn’t – later – have hallucinated Mary’s nipples as eyes. Another, all-mothering woman within his woman? No wonder he shrieked.

  Before Thomas can interrupt, Rachel goes on, ‘One day he snatches Ianthe from the wet-nurse, tears open his shirt and forces the tiny mouth against his own pure masculine nipple.’

  ‘Unmilky too,’ says Fran.

  ‘We don’t know the size of young Harriet’s breasts. Biggish ones, I imagine, in fashion again after the passing Empire vogue for pubescent contours.’

  ‘Did Shelley claim lactation? A man who could ask his wife if he’s eaten might believe anything.’

  Thomas pats away the question. ‘Shelley thinks all bodily parts and fluids integral to a self. Milk from one body is transferred into the being of the other taking the soul with it. The baby’s sullied by contact with a hired nurse paid to mother.’ Thomas pauses, but can’t resist going on though he risks blame for mansplaining. ‘Shelley thinks earthly existence corrupts children: nannies and parents, then schools and governments. In Queen Mab, the newly born is a stranger-soul peeping from its new tenement at desolation.’

  ‘Sad Harriet,’ smiles Rachel, ‘how many exacting tests she failed: she’s all flesh, not the Fairy of Queen Mab. Her babies live on earth, not in the sky.’

  Shelley does have a rather incorporeal sense of infants. Like Wordsworth imagining the child trailing clouds of glory into a fallen world, he toys with the notion that pre-birth memories may be recovered. As a student in Oxford, he snatches a baby on Magdalen Bridge and stares into its ignorant eyes. Then he dangles it over the river while demanding of the stricken mother whether the bundle he holds can tell us about preexistence.

  ‘A large class-element to this tale,’ suggests Fran.

  Indeed. A privileged youth, equipped with gown and mortar board, the mother most likely a working woman from the town. She’ll think the young man mad, so she’ll be cautious. Shelley’s response – gentlemen don’t explain or apologise – was ‘provokingly close’.

  We all know what’s coming, no need for second-hand story-telling.

  Harriet is pregnant again. Shelley abandons her and sets up with Mary, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, another sixteen-year-old virgin (with a sexy younger step-sister, not a bossy older one). Desperately unhappy and alone, Harriet drowns herself in the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park. Unlike Shelley, with his pistol-waving, poison-touting and folded arms in capsizing boats, she meant business. She’s pregnant for a third time, Fran presumes by Shelley, but keeps the opinion to herself. She looks angrily at Thomas as if he channels the Poet – as if he and Shelley between them have done for Harriet and poor Betty Pugh.

  At least Harriet lives on in someone else’s story. But it’s no compensation.

  Responding to Fran’s mood, Thomas says, ‘Shelley wasn’t a stone. He tells the legend of St Columbanus who hung his garment on a sunbeam, and adds, “I, too, have tried to discover a ray of light to fasten hope on it. The casualties of this world come on like waves, one succeeding the other.”’

  ‘He takes the miseries he caused as natural phenomena. Everything’s about him, the genius whose thrilling chords are ignored by a deaf world. What arrogant self-pity!’

  ‘OK,’ says Thomas, ‘OK.’

  They fall silent. Fran is still gripped with emotion; swallowing, she looks away. Thomas recognizes these moods from life with his mother – and mother-in-law. A temperament of female old age perhaps? To ease the moment, he asks, ‘If the lease on the house had been possible, how quickly before the commune failed?’

  Puzzled by Fran, Rachel welcomes the opening. ‘If it hadn’t at onc
e and if they’d stayed en famille in the harsh winter, young Harriet wouldn’t – at least so swiftly – have been abandoned, since Shelley wouldn’t have clapped eyes on Mary Wollstone-craft Godwin – who’ – Rachel can’t resist so fertile a counter-factual – ‘without this fall into Shelleyan history, wouldn’t have written Frankenstein, so denying the enemies of democracy, science and technology their handy metaphor.’

  Fran and Thomas laugh. ‘Yup,’ agrees Fran, letting her mood evaporate. ‘If he’d raised the cash, mightn’t the commune have had a chance? Doesn’t everyone want it, at least anyone dissatisfied with their own little platoon by birth, or without one?’ No one answers. ‘Shelley’s very habit of including everyone, the way he’s only briefly infatuated with a single woman, might have worked – romantic love’s not especially good for community living. But’ – and Fran wants to belittle her place to mitigate her friends’ insensitivity – ‘I guess it needed a better climate than mid-Wales, something on Lake Como or the French Riviera. A house with fountains, ferns and verandas, mirrors in orangeries, majolica tiled walls, flowers spilling from urns, peacocks on velvet lawns.’

  ‘Whoa,’ says Rachel.

  Thomas looks at Fran, surprised.

  ‘Just pretend,’ she shrugs. ‘Prettified, Nantgwyllt would still be a sort of landed spaceship on a promontory.’

  ‘Best keep it mental,’ smiles Rachel. ‘Coleridge’s stately pleasure dome for Kubla Khan, built with opium inside a warm den.’

  Donwell Abbey in its gentle valley suits me, observes Jane Austen. She’s enjoyed her walk alone up the steep road. Now she takes Fran gently by the elbow, hoping to steer her from illusion and information.

  Rachel and Thomas prepare to move.

  The rain that’s held off a while begins to roll down Fran’s cheek onto her chin. ‘Or a fantasy like a glass cathedral or opera house in the jungle,’ she says.

  Thomas looks questioningly.

  ‘I wonder,’ continues Fran, ‘if Shelley had stayed and written better poetry here, would his house have been a shrine like Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage in the Lake District. Would Elan Valley have been flooded to provide tap water for townies?’

  The idea intrigues Thomas. ‘At least Shelley poeticised what’s drowned. Washed away like him. How do you see it, Rachel?’

  ‘Let’s fill Nantgwyllt,’ interrupts Fran. ‘We came for the place and the poet but also for his vision, the commune of kindred spirits.’

  ‘It would have failed,’ repeats Thomas.

  ‘Of course, everything does in the end,’ says Rachel. ‘But while it lasted …’ She shrugs. ‘An experiment – non-possessive affection, equal sharing – ignoring for a moment the havoc desire always causes.’

  Exactly.

  Agafia had a sexually predatory ‘neighbour’. Modern interviewers light on this, not Agafia.

  ‘Think of Shelley’s hangers-on: Harriet (a good housekeeper, by the way – he disliked dirt), her organising sister, not so bad when diluted, Ianthe and the next baby, the young Shelley sisters, earnest Miss Hitchener. Plus – and Shelley needs men to avoid being ‘tranquillized’ into domesticity – Peacock, maybe an Oxford friend or two, then of course–though this might be hazardous given the factual – old Godwin and his girls: Mary, her stepsister Jane and half-sister Fanny. With so many women, Shelley can flitter attention from one to another, sultan-like. Perhaps then he wouldn’t have descended like lightening on handsome Mary and stayed too long. How many bedrooms did you say?’

  ‘Seven. Women share.’

  You confuse family with friendship, intrudes Jane Austen; one may compensate for the other’s absence – perhaps by the end of my life I took such a view. However, friendship lacks the resilience of blood.

  Recalling the touch of a wet oar in his hand, strong male knees on his back, Thomas frowns before entering this female game. ‘The earlier Romantics imagined secular utopias too. Southey and Coleridge dreamed up Pantisocracy in primitive America. Shelley called on Southey just after marrying Harriet.’

  ‘Aha!’ exclaims Fran. ‘Mrs Southey’s rejected butter biscuits.’

  ‘The bloody end of the French Revolution put most people off experimental living,’ continues Thomas. At times he feels older than the women.

  ‘That implies Shelley’s an anachronism,’ says Rachel. ‘I think people yearn to be solitary and in company. Communes appeal in any age, even if you haven’t the temperament.’

  ‘Wasn’t there something called Oneida in America?’ asks Fran wrinkling her forehead in a way that reminds Rachel of Disney’s White Rabbit. ‘Free sex, gender equality, etc.: heaven on earth because Jesus had already come.’

  Waiting for a future Rapture, Agafia can never experience the disappointment these communitarians feel – nothing to look forward to.

  Jane Austen dislikes the talk. A religious mind is sustaining, but one must be equal to what life offers.

  ‘Harriet’s babies would have had many mothers.’

  ‘There’d be children crawling everywhere. Free love, youth is fertile.’

  ‘All living on Shelley’s money or rather his father’s. A counter-factual too far?’ Thomas interrupts. ‘No one thinks of doing paid work outside the (notional) tilling of soil. With all his gifts, Shelley doesn’t write for money – as Jane Austen and Keats – and Byron – do.’

  ‘Ianthe would have toddled by the brook and never fallen in, so many watching female eyes.’

  Fran’s puzzled. Often mordant in tone, Rachel softens at the touch of a child.

  ‘Mothers, then grandmothers, and great-aunts; the men of course would have scuttled off.’

  If he hadn’t resolved to humour them, Thomas might have mocked emotions so typical of seventies’ feminists. Was Rachel old enough to be part of that naive cohort? He’s Googled but not discovered a birthdate. More success with Princeton. She’s in receptions with the President, who shares a surname with a reviewer in the New Yorker, who nods brief praise at her novel of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. He turns on Rachel the ingratiating face that charms Annie.

  It helps that both are tall, nearly on a level. He refrains from saying the obvious: the eyes of every communitarian would have been on Shelley and his delicious authority. Without him, they’d lose their purpose.

  Observing Thomas and Rachel engaged and moving off, just for an instant Fran plops down on the damp bracken, untying the strings of her wet hood like the ribbons of a bonnet. She looks towards the water, straightens her back.

  I was not, murmurs Jane Austen, taken unawares when my dear sister sketched my likeness. I knew exactly what I was presenting: Cassandra and I had excellent posture. And we didn’t sit on wet grass.

  In her seventies Agafia loads bales of wood on her back. She doesn’t care what she looks like to others. She’s blessed with a strong spine as well as good teeth.

  Fran stands up. No one has seen her. Only sheep move the wet green and copper fronds. She gazes on the lake. Fake of course. Without Shelley it’s nothing. Without memories: a reservoir anywhere. She picks up a stone, throws it far out, watching concentric rings ripple, mingling wind and human force. When the sun peeps from behind the rain cloud, it dazzles her.

  Shagreen and tortoiseshell, says Jane Austen gently.

  Maybe I was channelling a sheep, not you, grins Fran. Then she exclaims, Shit, not sheep either: Enid Blyton, Five Go Off to Camp and sleep on bracken!

  She catches up with Thomas and Rachel, who open to let her in – she feels a child between grown-ups. Or a hippo between giraffes.

  13

  That night Fran phones Annie from the B&B. Her room may be the dingiest – she’s over her (very slight) resentment there – but, by waving her mobile through the top of its dormer window, she traps a signal.

  She’s glad Annie hasn’t come. The few natives they’ve seen – probably Mum’s fourth and fifth cousins, well her blood anyway – would have smirked at the hats and Pretty Ballerina boots. Shelley never passed unnoticed. Also, Annie
might not have been enthusiastic enough. One thing in Rachel and Thomas, another in one’s Best Friend. Be unaware in a Norfolk garden if you will, not here. Homeland, you know.

  She visualises Annie scrabbling for the phone under the pillow or, if she is still in her study, among piles of papers. Fran rehearses an apology for calling so late. By the time she finds the right words, the phone demands a message. She presses Off.

  Still too early for sleep. Or, rather, her brain rejects the hour, ambushed by an evening of unaccustomed company. She reaches for her second-hand copy of The Vale of Nantgwilt by R. Eustace Tickell.

  She’ll use it next day, rain or shine, to make her companions see what they’re ignoring with their chatter: the erasure of place and people, dead and living, the colossal feat that caused the catastrophe. Thomas loves Shelley, the projector, the scientist, the speeder. Surely she can lure him into marvelling at the engineering – the vast acres involved, the gallons of water syphoned along aqueducts, through tunnels and pipes across half the country. Shelley and Thomas. And Rachel?

  She takes hours to drop off, but, when achieved, sleep is deep. She wakes refreshed and determined. ‘May I tell you the future of the house? Of Nantgwyllt. Before the flood, and after,’ she says when they meet in the hallway.

  ‘I’m a cultural historian by early training,’ says Rachel. ‘I relish antiquarianism, well some.’ She’s come to breakfast in another set of matching sportswear.

  Thomas has also slept well, his mobile silent on a bedside table. His ears prick up at Rachel’s remark. Should he enquire which university she attended? Would it be too direct?

  ‘Bryn Mawr,’ she says to his roundabout probe, ‘and elsewhere.’

  This morning Mrs Price offers scrambled eggs with bacon and sausage. Thomas urges his vegetarianism again and stays with toast and jam, no butter. Better read in modern fiction than Fran, Rachel is ambushed by John Updike’s image of a man jerking off into scrambled egg, then eating it with his new bride at their honeymoon breakfast. She asks for poached eggs, annoying the landlady, who daily regrets her decision to open a B&B after thirty years of council work. The poached eggs arrive half drowned.