Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  Then they were hauled further to see the ‘monotonous’ waste of moorland (the adjective comes from The Times reporter). And, finally, here’s Shelley.

  The royal gaze was directed across the water to where he had stayed. No longer the tiresome visionary of the early nineteenth century, Shelley was now a National Treasure. For ten minutes – apparently – the King and Queen contemplated the gigantic dam, the romantic scenery and the Romantic Poet.

  They’d arrived in Rhayader at midday, they left after three and were back in London by eight. ‘You can’t do that now.’

  Rachel’s about to express relief when Fran goes on. ‘But Birmingham continued to grow. Never enough water, until all of Wales is flooded for the benefit of England.’

  ‘Steady on,’ says Thomas. Even in modest states like Scotland and Wales, victim nationalism isn’t attractive.

  ‘Let me finish,’ begs Fran.

  Jane Austen groans.

  ‘To be honest,’ says Rachel, ‘we only care about the Shelley mansions. I’m enjoying the walks and I’m grateful to you for bringing me here. I can imagine more now.’

  ‘Hang on. I’m in the story. I was visiting my aunt and was given a Red Dragon to wave.’

  ‘OK,’ says Rachel, ‘OK. No appeasing a real witness.’

  ‘We’ll drive up to Claerwen and I’ll be brief.’

  Birmingham has its eye on the wild moorland above Nantgwyllt where the Claerwen surges with winter rain and melting snow. Once the Second World War is over, capital projects are fashionable, politic response to national bankruptcy and decay.

  Claerwen will be a great concrete dam (though dressed in stone – to match its fellows), holding almost as much water as the three Elan ones combined. Construction begins in 1946. It’s finished in 1952.

  ‘We don’t need the details,’ says Rachel, ‘but we want to hear your part, naturally.’

  Like other subjects of Empire, the post-war Welsh are less loyal and quiet than their fathers and grandfathers. Before the proposed royal opening, an explosion damages an aqueduct. Security is stepped up. The dams are floodlit, police guard entrances and exits.

  The opening of Claerwen goes ahead on 23 October. Elizabeth is queen but uncrowned. The old Elan train is gone and the royal pair detrain in Llandrindod. Much reduced from its Edwardian pomp, the town hides its shabby station with smart blue-painted boards. It installs a royal lavatory: the monarch with youthful bladder has no need to visit it.

  ‘I was there,’ says Fran, ‘my aunt made fairy cakes to sell, with icing-sugar crowns. She got me into the group of local children waving Welsh-dragon flags on the roadside between Llandrindod and Rhayader. It was cold and wet, and the royal car sped past like a rocket, so they didn’t see us. Our black cardboard hats were sopping.’

  ‘That’s the source of your republicanism?’ laughs Rachel. ‘I’d feel the same. No politician would ignore little children. But I guess hereditary rulers can.’

  The pretty young Queen (with her dashing Duke in tow) is welcomed to what the mayor calls ‘the Lakeland of Wales’ – the name never caught on. Like her great-grandfather fifty years before, she lacks skill with words and reads her speech in those strangulated vowels she’ll have to loosen over the seventy years of her reign. Like him, she praises a region she never sets foot in again (favouring tours to warmer, though more truculent, imperial possessions).

  Unlike in 1904, the weather’s awful. Heavy rain raises the water level too high for picturesque foam to cream the surface: when the royal hand pulls the lever, nothing happens. This time no one bothers with Shelley.

  Seagulls are diving round in the air that’s again growing chilly. Fran feels it crinkling and wrinkling the skin under her layers of clothing, though her jacket is tightly buttoned. Rachel and Thomas stroll off leaving her to her feelings as they look over Claerwen.

  She cups her hand to hear herself, then turns towards the dead people and houses under the water. A few yellow leaves are half submerged where lake meets mud. She’s been holding Shelley at bay, not knowing so much of him as Thomas and Rachel, but words from ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’, his great poem of self-puffing, dissolution and depression, flow through her mind. The drowned city he imagines is Venice and by the time of writing he’s a better poet than the youth who set toy boats floating on Elan river, but his vision of a flooded town haunts wherever his life is led:

  The fisher on his watery way,

  Wandering at the close of day,

  Will spread his sail and seize his oar

  Till he pass the gloomy shore,

  Lest thy dead should, from their sleep

  Bursting o’er the starlight deep,

  Lead a rapid masque of death

  O’er the waters of his path.

  The sun comes out in a rush and the slight chill withdraws. Between the scattering of rocks on the verge the grass is pea-green.

  Fran rejoins the other two. Thomas is raring to get on his bike again and do something more with this barren landscape before they leave for good. He likes his companions well enough but is a little tired of ferrying them about.

  ‘It’s a forlorn place to some,’ says Fran. ‘For me it’s less place than moment.’

  Oh dear, Rachel thinks, finding again this home-love too sentimental by half. Her ‘cabin’ in the Poconos is in a beautiful woody setting, but she never lets it saturate her mind. Fran’s enjoying her memories, Thomas is gloating over machinery: suffering phonelessness, Rachel isn’t sure she wants to hear more of either. The land’s too bare for humans to cope with, its hills fold in on themselves instead of coming out squarely as mountains.

  Fran turns away so Rachel and Thomas don’t notice her staring. Here, just here where the small river flows into the lake, here Andrew said he wanted something.

  But he was never clear. Kind, methodical, nebulous Andrew. Because he was so often silent, she’d thought him insensitive. Yet on that hot cloudless day he’d commented on a spindly tree with just a few sprouts of life, its bony branches leaning out over the little river. One there now. Fran doubts it’s the original. It doesn’t matter. She’s been here and seen a tree.

  Jane Austen pats her shoulder lightly, Remember, what are men to rocks and mountains?

  Irony may be true.

  Back at the B&B it’s what the landlady calls ‘fish ’n’ chip’ night. They eat the vivid peas and soggy chips, while Fran and Rachel also attack the crisp batter armouring small slivers of dry fish.

  ‘Grass is pea-green but peas are never grass-green,’ Fran remarks.

  Rachel eats with the circumspection Fran used for her first meal of raw Japanese swordfish. Surely she’s had fish and chips before, though perhaps never as dry and fatty as this. Then she understands: Rachel is simply sapped with tiredness, her eyes almost shutting as she chews. She’s unused to boisterous weather thinks Fran guiltily. She’s forced her to walk and stand around while she, Fran, rattled on. ‘Tough it out,’ she smiles prodding the batter.

  They retire early, before the yellowish light of the long evening is quite gone. Demented ideas speed round Fran’s throat, which feels stuffed with paper handkerchiefs. Out of the blue she imagines Rachel young and in leather catsuit. ‘For God’s sake, get a grip,’ she says aloud, thinking of her gaudy flash of fancy with Tamsin. She’s glad Jane Austen is sound asleep in her wardrobe.

  Next morning, she packs up night things and washbag, then, before leaving the room, tries Annie again.

  ‘You’re all identifying with Shelley too much. It isn’t healthy.’

  ‘I can hear you swallow after you said that,’ mocks Fran. ‘I don’t care for Shelley any more than you do. I prefer the thinginess of Wordsworth touching “the hem of Nature’s shift” – as Shelley put it, rather indecorously. But Shelley was here. He saw the Elan and Claerwen rivers roaring before they were tamed into quiet lakes.’

  ‘Now you’re identifying with him and the rivers. Poor Fran, soon you’ll be going out in moonlight searchi
ng for his ghost. Best come home.’

  Fran switches off the phone. Her memories have stirred no one else, her stories, her facts and fiction, just used-up air. Why tell them? Dr Johnson said (according to Annie) a story should make us enjoy life or endure it. Rachel’s unanchored tales are better, more believable. Fran thinks of her cheerful aunt, the cakes, Andrew, depressed – she now supposes – in all this whirring air. Words shuffle about.

  Will the place remember her? That moment when she sat on a tussock of springy turf, like Jane Austen on the seaside path? Did young bookish Frances once sink down on that very spot: does it hold her youth? She fancies the dead from the mansions and cottages rising like crocuses in spring, their stable consciousness travelling down the centuries. Or herself, young and old, with them as pebbles at the bottom of the lake.

  Jane Austen is preparing to leave too. You have to foreclose, you know. Learn to speak, cut, and edit – lives and words.

  Fran feels deflated as she drags her holdall across the landing, bumping it down the stairs. Wrapped in a fluffy towel inside, Tickell can come to no harm. She feels the rasp in her throat and fears a cold coming.

  I have little compassion for colds, says Jane Austen sidling by. Someone always has one; best make a joke of it. How shocking to have a cold, she mocks.

  You said you felt languid and solitary when you had one, barks Fran to the retreating back.

  Relieved of the Authorial presence, she hazards a little more melodrama when the friends meet outside. ‘It feels like the flooding of my own life somehow.’

  ‘Why, just because you were born in that grey village? Come off it!’ says Rachel, happier now she anticipates a signal on the road home.

  ‘OK. I just remember it as wilder when I was a child. We came in a Morris Minor. We had to get out to let Dad drive the car up the steeper hills. Grass and flowers seemed brighter, granite rocks more sparkling. Just young, I guess.’

  ‘My father fished,’ says Thomas. ‘I envied him because he got away from Mother’s talking. He’d sit looking at no one and nothing but water. He was a silent man except when infuriated by fish farms and maddened salmon. I remember his trout rivers, very sparkly for a child. Seem nothing special now.’

  ‘Wordsworthian,’ chuckles Rachel, ‘the splendour only the child sees before the shine fades.’

  ‘On the road, everyone,’ says Thomas.

  Does Fran discern a tender look between him and Rachel? Impossible, she’s decades older, he’s married. Her heart slows. Doesn’t do to be surrounded by lovers. She’s about to bat the idea away when she finds herself smiling. Tenderness and love aren’t necessarily – not even primarily – excluding. Don’t they overflow?

  Wear pattens and keep your feet dry.

  When you said the intimacy between Harriet and Emma must sink once they’re married, she whispers, did you mean sex trumps affection or friendship can’t exist with marriage? Or is it class, now we know Harriet’s stain of illegitimacy is unbleached by nobility or wealth?

  Jane Austen shrugs, then smiles slyly. You believe the reader’s in charge, so answer yourself.

  Thomas fixes his bicycle to the back of his Land Rover, while the women pile their baggage into the hired Vauxhall. Abruptly Rachel says, ‘Perhaps we might all go to Venice for Shelley. Annie’d come too. Nice hotels, prosecco, baccalà.’

  As Fran starts the car, the phone signal cuts in. A text arrives. ‘God, I know why you’re there, Fran. Crass of me not to see it. I’m on the next train.’

  She texts back: ‘No need, we’re just leaving. Anyway, no train.’

  Then she remembers: that anecdote she’d told, of the car unable to climb the hills – it was with Andrew not Dad. A VW, not a Morris Minor.

  Part Three

  15

  Andrew? A soft scar not a wound.

  Fran regrets saying he disappeared at Elan Valley. Annie was curious and the idea tumbled out. Annie, who prides herself on being rational, added poetic detail. Why not leave her the tale?

  Sometimes memory is retentive, serviceable, and obedient, parrots Jane Austen, sometimes tyrannical and controlling. Sometimes you remember little. I myself …

  Who’s talking? What of motivated forgetting?

  Fran resolves to take herself less seriously. She reaches for a notebook in the drawer of her rolltop desk, one of a diminishing pile pinched from the FE college. If the marvellous, tragic Mary Wollstonecraft could write her life as a comedy (sadly, husband William Godwin destroyed the manuscript) then the comic mode opens for us all. Fran stares through the window at leaves no longer freshly green.

  Try practising what daffy Julie recommended for 4 a.m. glums: list good things – ‘counting blessings’, Mum called it. Home, food, small pension.

  Jane Austen clears her throat. I made near £600 from my work. Possibly it would have been more had I handled my own affairs.

  You are always about money.

  Food too is a blessing, if not in excess: the mountain of wedding leftovers in my ‘Lesley Castle’ after all that roasting, broiling and stewing; Dr Grant of Mansfield dying from three institutionary dinners; hampers of apples so kindly sent us from Kintbury are covering …

  Sometimes Jane Austen rabbits on as much as Agafia.

  Again Fran thinks of Julie who never ate sugar, salt or improper fats. Where is she now? Each week she drove to Sea Palling in the early morning to ‘dispel toxins’ through shouting at the top of her lungs from a clifftop. Once Fran went along, carrying a message for Andrew inside a rinsed Heinz Ketchup bottle: she’d intended to fling it out to sea but it stayed in her anorak pocket. She was refreshed by the yelling until, spying a knot of twitchers, she recovered inhibitions; Julie continued balling.

  Maybe her crystals and meditation, therapy, shouting, yoga, circle dancing, diminished diet, colonic irrigation, and expensive visits to spas and beauty salons (a lucrative divorce), had delivered the nurturing, romantic, rich, handsome man Julie craved, and she’d abandoned ‘negativity’. Fran had laughed about her to Annie, but the woman knew what she wanted and pampered herself till she got it.

  She did laughter therapy too. Gelotology, the study of how laughter affects the mind and body: a striped ice-cream of a word.

  When not empty and habitual, laughter is, it’s said, a sudden glory from thinking ourselves superior to someone, something, or (occasionally) ourselves at another time.

  Jane Austen’s laughs are joyful, sexy or vacuous but never solitary. Only drunks giggle alone. Fran stifles a chuckle as the wicked teenage tales of murder and comic mayhem flood her mind.

  So, now to try a little grown-up autofiction, a modern mode. In the Three Geese Annie said one’s feelings lack authority. We’ve exchanged self-knowledge for self-preoccupation, she’d added.

  Yup, agrees Fran. She grins at her friend’s certainties before the hummable tune of ‘Amazing Grace’ intrudes.

  She’s no urge to Social Media, the cats, flowers and bakery snaps of elderly sharing. But in a notebook with sharpened pencil surely some use of her past might answer – more than her other retirement ‘projects’: the study of Dylan Thomas and R.S. Thomas, an unlikely combo if ever; dying from the dyer’s perspective – no editing possible if using experience, of course (ha ha!). ‘You haven’t died yet,’ Annie’d objected. ‘Anyway, been done. Sylvia Plath said she did dying very well.’

  She hadn’t though.

  What can Fran call herself? Retired teacher? Mother of course, for there’s sweet distant Johnnie, seen now mainly in lumpy face ‘chats’. What else? Andrew had every right to disappear, but she’d prefer being a proper widow, not a fading-out Penelope weaving fibs – with no bereavement cards. Self-spoiling, certainly, yet distinguishing too. A disappeared spouse separates one from run-of-the mill divorcees and widows. It just lacks a word.

  Johnnie doesn’t talk much of it. Only Fran knows he’d be another man had he folded his clothes neatly and brushed his teeth after every meal, with kindly coercive Andrew watching him.
Now he imagines colourful scenarios to bury the absence: one clear blue day in New Zealand Dad shows up from South America with a native wife and lithe grown children to give him the family his mother tried unsuccessfully to provide through her friend’s conceited kids.

  Maybe the problem’s simply retirement. Near a year without even a part-time job unmoors a body. Fran doesn’t miss work. The excel sheets, benchmarks, outcome-based success measures, longitudinal education effects. Usually she sides with Lady Catherine de Burgh in her dispute with unschooled Elizabeth Bennet (so impudent to her elders and studious sister Mary). But, occasionally, she wonders at the efficacy of any tuition. Has she left traces on the FE college or its students? Probably waters closed even before her colleagues walked their separate ways from the Brigands’ Arms following her leaving drinks.

  On her first day there, she’d been given a shared office with her own desk. In the drawer she found an empty crisp packet. Salt and vinegar. So her predecessor was a traditionalist, female – mainly women teach English Literature – or literacy, as Annie once mocked her trade. Did this woman voluntarily walk away? What story in the crisp packet, left carelessly, or purposely, when files and handcream vanished?

  Has Fran impinged on anyone? She recalls a clever boy who’d failed in school, then slouched his way to her: a beautiful adolescent – beauty can be found anywhere, nothing improper to know it. At first, he seemed stupid, his head having played no conspicuous part in his life. His time would come, she’d thought. His mother was everything to him; on an Open Day, she saw this mother was indeed something. Jamaican, a flamboyant Pentecostal, she seemed to live in a sequence of sun and twilit evenings. On ‘benefits’: her gift was to benefit the world. ‘Fair do’s’, as Mum used to say. When Fran praised her, the boy replied, ‘Not like you, eh?’