Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  Next to her a small plump Fellow tries to regain her attention. In a deep voice she wonders could ever carry in a lecture hall, he says, ‘You might be interested to know that Nero watched gladiators through an emerald. Possibly it helped his short sight.’

  ‘Really,’ says Annie, looking demurely at her plate.

  ‘And, of course, spectacle-makers invented the telescope.’

  She turns her gaze on him, a sequin flashes in the candlelight. Outside the closed curtains, it’s still daylight.

  ‘They had bifocal lenses in the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin mentions them. After a certain age everyone needs spectacles.’

  ‘If great readers, perhaps,’ says Annie, whose reading glasses are tucked into her beaded evening bag.

  ‘Everyone who reads at all.’

  The plump Fellow senses the Master’s wife regarding them both, pencilled eyebrows raised. He shifts his buttocks inside their black trousers and thick gown. Sweat settles round his testicles. ‘More quackery in optometry than almost any other area,’ he continues. ‘Have you heard of iridology and supposed ways of reversing myopia? No? As if exercising the eye and eating special food could affect a lens!’ While he laughs, his nose leaks just a little. ‘A man called Bates told people they could throw away their spectacles.’ He shakes his head in disbelief, a small droplet leaves his nose to land on his black tie.

  A pity, thinks Annie, for the timbre of his voice, though low and gravelly, isn’t unpleasing. That droplet is a killer.

  A mousey woman – of course, his wife, this is the one feast of the year to welcome spouses – pulls at his arm from his other side. She’s no more minded than a fruit fly on his thick jacket.

  ‘I thought it was a useful exercise to cover eyes with your palms and try to see blackness,’ says Annie glancing towards the Master’s wife now talking in skinny animation.

  ‘Indeed yes. It has merit but won’t cure myopia and cataracts.’ Her neighbour’s warming again to his subject. ‘As I say, many quacks. One authority recommended putting small eye-stones under the eye lid.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ says Annie thinking involuntarily of Paul and frowning, ‘people can be so gullible.’

  ‘I’m boring you, I fear,’ he says, loudly enough to startle his irritated wife.

  ‘Yes, goodness,’ she says, ‘Annie won’t want to hear all that stuff about optics.’

  He gives her a withering glance before Annie can lean round to say, ‘No, really, it’s fascinating.’

  ‘Robert Hooke, the great promoter of microscopes, argued that such new optical instruments could restore perfect eyesight not seen on earth since Adam and Eve fell.’

  ‘Hope it wasn’t a disappointment,’ replies Annie. Then she adds, ‘Blind eyes are more terrible than seeing ones.’

  Before he can articulate surprise, she leans back in her chair and remarks, ‘I think your wife needs your attention.’ She’s putting them both down, but why not? We’re all outsiders, as Fran would say, trying to make the smuggest bits of England a little less smug. The wet patch on the man’s tie is almost dry: it leaves only the slightest outline of a stain. His wife will have the right kind of chemical in a bottle to remove it.

  Across the table the Master’s wife is saying, ‘I abhor vivisection or any cruelty to animals.’ The benign Nobel Prize winner next to her, pats her thin arm in its tight emerald sleeve and says, ‘Yet such research does so much good for human beings. Think how much suffering of children will be alleviated by the pain of a few rats.’

  Annie doesn’t hear the rest. The poor man forgets the Master is childless. His wife has two silkily flowing Afghan hounds.

  *

  That night in the house lined with bookshelves Paul painted green, Annie waives her rule of smoking only in the garden. She does however open the window. The weather’s balmy; the scent of something flowery wafts in. Lilac and jasmine are gone, it’s too late for wallflowers. Is it honeysuckle? Surely too strong. Roses? But hers, inherited from previous owners of the house, are red and blowsy, with blemishes and weak scent.

  Did this mixed ostentation and uselessness mean they’d been bred for disease? Oh rose, thou art sick.

  In his fatal illness, Zach Klein had said quite clearly, despite a clogged throat, ‘The invisible worm.’ A phrase from Blake’s poem ‘Sick Rose’, it had to be; yet she’d never known he loved or even read Blake. Was it the morphine? But drugs can only access what’s inside. Or is there something Jungian out there, a cloud of fragmentary quotations from well-known poetry, songs, snippets much used and strummed through a million mouths – to which anyone may let their consciousness or dreaming mind have access?

  If any Blake lingered in Zach, it ought to be the image of Nobodaddy, the great blind Bully in the sky. Zach thought browbeating his family droll. Yet for Annie, as much as for her mother and stupid Josh, it had been deadly, the only difference being – they went on admiring what crushed them. Was she so different from her pathetic brother? In adult years, while hating him she’d accepted no man came up to Zach, held a candle to his showy brilliance, certainly not ineffectual Paul – though, now absconded, his act of desertion puffed him out of old recognition. For all his antics, Zach Klein had, to Annie’s chagrin, never left the family home. When she said a variation of this, Fran greeted it with, ‘Take a BA in the blindingly obvious’ – and, on her birthday, gave her a mug decorated round its middle with an irritating Austen quotation: ‘So much we don’t know of ourselves … Very seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure.’

  The flowery smell still assails her nostrils. Is she smelling the garden as it used to be when Paul tended it? She blinks to dislodge bitterness – the garden, the house – done up with her money.

  She stubs out her cigarette in an ornamental alabaster ashtray kept pristine till now. She gets up, unzips her dress, lets it fall to the floor, then tries to expunge both Paul and Zach with violent yoga postures. She succeeds better by thinking of Fran and Rachel.

  She’d had no desire to go to Elan Valley, indeed still doesn’t know exactly where it is. A Londoner through and through, she’s familiar with every street and dead-end that could be breached in Camden, Hampstead and Islington (privately, she regards Cambridge as little more than a provincial cow town). Yet she wishes the others hadn’t gone to this outlandish Welsh place without her.

  ‘Are you allowed to drown in drinking water?’ she’d asked Fran in their last phone-call.

  ‘Can’t even fish in it. Sorry, Annie, it’s so long ago. Dead past. I’ve finished settling it.’

  Annie sits and smokes, then stubs out her cigarette and picks up her discarded dress. She phones. Fran will be in bed but not sleeping, so it’s all right to disturb. ‘Nothing settles,’ she says. She’s still impatient with anyone not experiencing her own fiery distress. ‘You reinvent your past. Quite a skill.’

  ‘Well,’ Fran wants to mollify, ‘when Johnnie reached his dad’s age, he said he thought he should maybe create some excitement in his easy life by having a mid-life crisis.’

  That’s a giveaway, thinks Annie. Unable to shrug off her own ache, she exclaims, ‘Poor Fran.’

  Gulping back annoyance, Fran sits up in bed. ‘You will get through,’ she says. She’s weary of repeating herself, but that’s friendship.

  ‘I won’t,’ says Annie.

  Why tell people what they should do and will feel? It makes them unhappy and you disliked. In grief we become toddlers.

  I know what you mean, whispers Jane Austen into Fran’s right ear. Think of petulant Marianne responding to Elinor’s sound advice.

  Just as well Fran’s silent, thinks Annie. If she can utter such triteness, losing Andrew can’t ever have been much. Or is Fran making a point that she, Annie, is more needy?

  ‘Sorry, Fran,’ she says. ‘On edge. They’re having a baby.’

  ‘Bound to happen.’

  ‘That should teach her. “Happy heart” doesn’t sound the kind of woman to scrape shit off a
sleepsuit.’

  ‘Were we?’ murmurs Fran. ‘Must try to sleep.’

  18

  Annie gets up late from a dream-disturbed night. Can you dream wrongly? Again she smokes by the open window, an empty coffee cup beside her. She’s thinking of Rachel who’s not yet quite real to her. How is she teaching creative writing with only one unremembered novel? Rachel had patted away her (discreet) enquiry. People may write in different genres, she’d implied. Under different names? Multiple personae? Where then is truth in the memories she shares? Does she fib like Fran?

  They say you can make something true by imagining it intensely: can you make it go away by energetically forgetting?

  Not yet. Moths fly in a jar.

  Zach said he was relieved when her childhood was over. The misery of that memory almost chokes her. Vomit it all up, she orders herself. No masticating, swallowing then regurgitating; just spew it straight out.

  What had the man wanted from her? Reverence, admiration? He got them from her mother, the woman he forced to become feeble and of little use to her daughter.

  Why fuss? He’s gone and Paul is gone. So let’s clipclop through this finite life.

  When Thomas Ashe was still her research student, Annie asked him a searching question to prod him further in his study of Shelley and the numinous. He’d answered, ‘Dum-dum.’ It made them both smile. Dum-dum, she says to herself now.

  Fran’s no scholar, more a feral academic. She loves the byways and fusion of words, her mental hodgepodge, her gallimaufry. Giving houseroom to Jane Austen is weird, but a little of the imaginary may not be so bad. Conan Doyle, creator of the rational sleuth, believed in fairies. Embarrassed by his credulity, we say that, like so many Englishmen of his time, he was emotionally battered by the First World War, so turned to magic and spiritualism as exit from horror. But perhaps no need of four years unrelenting bloodshed; a more modest battering or bruising may explain bizarre sightings. Is this Fran’s situation: Andrew’s disappearing a bigger deal than she’s let on? Yet, that self-righteous Author of hers is no fairy.

  She stubs out her third Gauloises in the ornamental ashtray, leans back in her Fritz Hansen Egg Chair and stares through the window. Dum-dum has failed, the ghost returns.

  Even in death Zach was lucky: throat cancer silenced his poxy voice, so he hadn’t lived to see his beloved Marxism roll out like Matthew Arnold’s Sea of Faith. She might any time have equalled the old goat, become an intellectual superstar herself: demotic firebrand one day, high-and-mighty scholar the next. Isn’t the world better for her reticence, her refusal of crude journalism? She’s said as much to the chaps on College high table. In my day, they chuckled, if you had anything to communicate, you did it over port. Yet still she seethes at failures only this man could knead into her heart.

  To spite him, she’d settled for girlie EngLit, an autopsy of a subject if ever. (The alternative of throwing herself violently away took more guts than she’d ever had …) When she’d flung Zach a fine review of her first monograph on political writing of the 1790s – OK by a colleague in Chicago – he sneered,

  See, ladling butter from alternate tubs,

  Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs.

  That monograph had more citations than most of those remaindered by fucking Academicians who’d turned her down – not once but three times. (She hasn’t told Fran that – Fran who soothes her when she complains of her world, Fran who loves and, she thinks wrongly, envies her.)

  Why, her friend once asked, doesn’t she protest openly? She’s spent years combing history for rebels to hurl at the forever elite purring and preening at the top of everything from land to culture. Why not shout out at the present?

  In 1819 Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse wrote an article on the ‘Six Acts’ Parliament passed to gag radical newspapers and prevent large meetings in order to stop the French Revolution spawning a second English one.

  ‘What prevents the people from walking down to the House, and pulling out the members by the ears, locking up their doors and flinging the key into the Thames,’ asked Hobhouse.

  ‘The horse-guards down the road,’ responded Lord Byron.

  Exactly.

  Annie smiles, thinking that Fran is simply less aware of horse-guards than she is.

  Fran never met Zach Klein, so can never know Annie as Annie knows her. For Annie has been to Fran’s parents’ little bungalow, just before ‘Dad’ died. Not smelling of the honeyed ham Fran mentioned when she occasionally spoke of childhood, but still having about it the air of a cosy little shop, with everything offered at a reasonable price, the quaint parents living to serve themselves and others. Fran feared Annie would be condescending to them, gracious in an upper-middle-class way. But Annie felt moved that Fran was sharing with her these good people – though she wouldn’t and couldn’t for one moment have imagined herself being their child. Now Fran’s ‘Mum’ has gone, drifted off into a place where no one’s buying or selling, while she, Annie, has lost mother and father. It brings them together. Both orphans.

  When Josh and she went to pack up the now expensive Chalcot Square house and sell the books – discovering that old Sociology, even by inflammatory Zach Klein, wasn’t worth what they’d hoped – she found the place grimy and rank: laundry stank in the basket and kitchen fumes lingered on dining-room curtains, while the cluttered study swirled out a stench of cigars and full-bodied sickly red wine. Nothing like this was allowed in her mother’s time, though Zach’s personal habits must always have been grubby. Sadie had hardly been noticed, but she’d kept all these rooms pristine where now they were dirty and decayed. With her absence, had vain Zach realised he was not a coper, not an independent self-reliant man after all? She doubted he’d had such awareness, even as his clothes and rooms began to stink.

  Yet, something animated remained in the showy house – which Oxbridge Annie had once judged lacking the shabby, refined gentility of the established academic tribe. A kind of residual hubbub from Zach’s talking, loose gravel on the underside of a shoe, though no words could be made out.

  The property was in a ‘good neighbourhood’ with access to an exclusive little railed garden. As children, she and Josh played in this Goldengrove – with no great enthusiasm, having nothing in common. He’d seek out insects to kill or maim while she studied people walking outside the railings. Perhaps passers-by were envious of those within, allowed to feel grass instead of tarmac under feet, while she imagined herself beyond her caged existence into the little family groups that armed each other and wheeled pushchairs, dragged poodles and waddling dachshunds.

  When she visited Chalcot Square from Cambridge, she found this garden with its iron gate the ultimate symbol of everything wrong with the country, her family and childhood. Now, if she were inside the railings, strangers would be walking with headphones clamped to their ears, removing them far from excluding patches of grass.

  With a little renovating and much disinfecting, the ‘family home’ brought in a tidy sum. Most went to Josh who’d never held down a job but had taken on a wife with children already clinging to her. OK, Annie wasn’t in financial need then, and what she got was more than enough to pay off a mortgage and fix up the Cambridge house for herself, Paul and the kids, throwing out the back wall in the common way of the neighbourhood. Yet it wasn’t ‘fair’ when you thought about it. Josh had even taken Zach’s only picture of value, a portrait by von Neff of some rabbi from Estonia. Not that she cared for the subject – was she the only Jew utterly uninterested in forebears?

  Still gazing through the window, she thinks of Fran’s delight in her visiting blackbird. Where Paul had made a raised bed to grow lettuce and rocket, a pigeon now hops among the ragwort and dandelions as if hobbled. It looks too heavy to fly and yet, with what seems an enormous effort, it pushes itself into the air. It’s borne up to land inelegantly on a cherry-tree bough that bends under its portliness. But it has flown, thinks Annie, looking out for analogies in life.

&nbs
p; Not waddling but flying.

  19

  Latish summer and Fran comes again to stay with Annie to finalise the Venice trip. The train rolls over the low wet land beyond Ely, boats below road banks and lonely blank houses across open fields. She’s considering Odysseus, the cunning storyteller, striding out of the known into so many new worlds and words. I too, she thinks, am going into new worlds. Do I have enough material to entertain the natives?

  Want of material never stopped me from writing, announces Jane Austen.

  Once more, Fran and Rachel sit in the independent café where they planned the Elan trip. They know each other better now. Fran moves her chair to settle her legs, wishing she had more bulk in this pokey upstairs room. As usual, the young govern the air with their enormous limbs and laughter, taking more space than is decently theirs.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you I liked our Welsh jaunt,’ says Rachel. ‘Even more in retrospect. It’s helped me come to a decision to stay.’

  ‘In Wales?’ Fran shifts her eyebrows which, Rachel thinks, would benefit from some threading or tattooing.

  ‘No, ’course not, but in Britain, here, not going back to New York. I was on secondment for the writing course. I could be renewed.’

  Fran finds this notion of choice invigorating – in jobs, country, even it seems in age, for Rachel must be in her mid-sixties, older? Here she’d be pushed out to grass – or kept on part-time as last resort for an emptying classroom.

  Rachel is looking away. Enabled to stare with impunity, Fran registers again her companion’s polished, groomed, manicured appearance. She’s handsome in that synthetic American way, yet, underneath the high gloss, a little perhaps dilapidated. Maybe the wind and rain in Wales had disguised both gloss and worn underlay. Or was there a perforation below the surface?

  ‘Even if I weren’t, I could just stay.’

  ‘Without a job?’

  ‘I have a little family money.’

  ‘Righto. So, in Venice you kip at the Danieli while we pig it over a taverna in Mestre?’