Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  Rachel’s steadying herself. Can she convert her encounter into a short story? Uncertain: narrative isn’t a prosthetic. It would in any case have too much sugar for the lime and salt. Rachel smiles to herself remembering the ingredients you must always balance.

  Fran’s in her cottage, thinking of Annie again – and herself. She likes bits of women, she realises, hair, an eye or breast, but rarely palpitates at a whole body. Is that strange? Knowing – and this was truly low – most of all she wishes to get into bed next to Jane Austen, doing nothing untoward, simply lying in spoon position, hearing from her a perfect phrase on the edge of sleep.

  She sees her Author smile and – for a moment – feels warm and safe inside.

  The landline phone interrupts. Fran expects Annie’s voice. She’s been unusually silent; Fran has been carrying round her mobile in her gardening pocket, just in case.

  ‘Have you made provisions for if you pass?’

  ‘Pass what?’

  Understanding dawns. Interesting intransitive use, leftover from belief in immortality, passing from one state to another in death, which now, for most, implies no such move.

  ‘Are you still there?’ she asks her cold caller – why not ‘hot’? Down the line a scrabbling of mice or shifting of papers, a slurp? Perhaps from some stuffy room in Ukraine or Bolton where canned fizzy liquid is drunk. She waits, breathing into the mouthpiece.

  The voice returns. ‘Have you given power of attorney to someone?’

  ‘Ah,’ says Fran, ‘you have my birthdate.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ says the voice, ‘you gave it as identity along with your mother’s last name, first pet and place of birth. Incidentally, ma’am, you got that wrong on the second try.’

  ‘I couldn’t get my place of birth wrong,’ protests Fran.

  ‘Ma’am, it was misunderstood.’

  It’s coffee, not Coke, they’re drinking, something hot in a cup or bowl. A new voice enters. Fran has exhausted Tanya or Kirstie. A male person, British-Indian? says his name is ‘Maurice’. He offers help.

  Fran puts down the phone. Not safe anywhere. She sees the nosy BT wire looping through the trees into her house.

  Now of course she considers death. As if one needs nudging! ‘Death is not an event in life,’ Annie quoted Wittgenstein as she and Fran stood by his grave off Huntingdon Road; it was stained with the shit of berry-eating birds.

  Fran takes out her mobile to tell Annie of the cold mortality call. As she begins, Annie cuts across, ‘The Master’s dead. He was ailing, people muttered he should go … now he has.’

  She surprises Fran by wanting to talk. Curling her feet under her on the sofa, Fran says, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, a few of us lined up round the smaller court, gardeners and secretaries, you know. The coffin was supposed to pass through to its private funeral. The wait went on. People chatted in bursts about weekend breaks and teeth implants, whatever. A couple of Fellows stood further down the line, the rest stayed away.’ Annie pauses, ‘Fran, are you still there? You usually interrupt.’

  ‘I’m here,’ says Fran, cupping the phone between ear and shoulder, so she can look at the pile of bills on the floor waiting to be sorted.

  ‘A man like a beadle strides out of the lodge, looks like a Lord Mayor’s procession, then the coffin draped in patterned velvet, carried by six suited guys.’ Annie decides to censor her response: that she’d come to be moved, quite liking the old boy. She’d put a linen handkerchief up her sleeve but hadn’t used it. ‘Behind the coffin, leaning on the arm of a tall young man comes the widow. With four perfect flowers sticking out of a bag of water. Can you believe – the hounds walk after her?’

  Dogs and flowers were, Annie now considers, meant as a touch of domesticity.

  ‘I wanted to burst out laughing, I had to hold myself rigid, the whole thing exactly like the opening of grand opera.’

  She’s mum about her other feeling: of being shortchanged. By what? That at this solemn moment no one in the procession noticed her. Why on earth would they? While she watched herself rather than the dead.

  She’s said too much. She’s restrained on email but Fran ringing just then has set her off.

  ‘Good of you to go,’ says Fran moving the mobile from her shoulder, ‘but why did you?’

  ‘Dunno,’ says Annie. ‘I suppose we want a bit of pomp and style after the messiness of dying. Memorial services are a bore.’

  When both have been silent too long but Annie seems disinclined to hang up, Fran asks, ‘What music would you choose? In the crematorium I mean, while people assemble. Can’t decide between the end of Schubert’s “Quintet” and Elgar’s “Where corals lie” with Janet Baker. “Amazing Grace” by Treorchy Male Voice Choir? Maybe one single chord.’

  Annie often plans her twelve tunes for an appearance on Desert Island Discs – she’s thought of leaving a final list in case her monographs achieve posthumous fame and her ghost is offered the coveted slot on Radio 4. She tries to imagine the crematorium: ‘Perhaps Miles Davis or Leonard Cohen.’

  Disrespectful of Europe, Fran thinks. ‘Life’s so important, yet a corpse weighs the same as a living body, a second before translation.’

  ‘We don’t know that, do we?’

  We do know the corpse of a herring is iridescent long after death.

  Part Four

  21

  My sea, remarks Jane Austen, is not lonely. My naval heroes force enemy ships to surrender, they wrest riches from storms. Its bluster gives bloom to my girls – dear Fanny Price on Portsmouth ramparts, perfect Anne Elliot on the Cobb at Lyme. Like your Cambridge, however, Venice is built on a swamp: at best one might say it fronts a flat lagoon. ‘Lagoon’ is a lonely word.

  Don’t stay if you feel like that, retorts Fran in the Marco Polo baggage hall. We were sad for poor Harriet Shelley in Elan Valley; it’ll be sadder for Mary Shelley on the Lido. No opening for pertness and sardonic quips. (People get tetchy at airports.) I didn’t tell you to come.

  Italy with its pines and vices, Mrs Radcliffe’s gothic town? Why would I not?

  How quick come the reasons for approving what we like, smiles Fran.

  The Author purses her lips. One cannot creep upon a journey.

  The afternoon heat blankets the women as they deposit their holdalls and cases in their rooms: Annie and Fran on Giudecca Island where lodging is cheaper and the fish stew the best; Thomas in a shabby palazzo arranged by a colleague from Ca’ Foscari, Venice’s university; Tamsin with her cosmetics and blogging equipment, Blue Tooth Remote, tripod, ring light etc., in an Airbnb above a pharmacy in Cannaregio; and Rachel, braving their mockery, in a classy hotel by the Accademia. ‘I have allergies,’ she explains.

  To Thomas, even here Shelley is more alluring than Byron – never the glow-worm he once pretended to be under the Byronic sun. (In any case, who was the sun in that duo? When Shelley died, didn’t Byron take on his ideal visions and go off to death too? No, Annie had laughed when years back he’d tried out the idea in a seminar.)

  In due course he’ll seek traces in the gorgeous Marciana Library near the Basilica, then the far less grand Celestia and Polizia Mortuaria. His grasp of Italian handwriting isn’t great, but initially he’ll just look for names under the ‘second Austrian Domination’ – and be patient. Striding from each to each, he expects, despite his map app, to find himself on dead-end paths and hump-back bridges with shaky or no rails. But now, while his companions are still unpacking, putting clothes in wardrobes and drawers, setting up their facial and electronic equipment in Tamsin’s case, he uses the last daylight hours to begin his search by visiting the Danieli Hotel on Schiavoni.

  Where did the Shelleys go when they reached Venice? An Italian scholar claimed it was the Danieli, citing a visitor register (in his possession) to prove it. The place is pricey now, possibly always was: Shelley never pigged it, though not drawn, like Byron, to the luxurious in life or décor.

  In the twilit interior Thomas mentions his interes
t. The receptionist is indifferent.

  Many celebrities have stayed with us, he says staring at a group of glitzily clad Russians by the ornate stairway. No, he’s sure the manager has neither time nor inclination to see him.

  Thomas brings out the talismanic name: Byron too lacks power.

  ‘I’m disappointed,’ he says to the women when he joins them for a first dinner on Giudecca. Perhaps his low mood has more to do with Tamsin’s absence, for Rachel has carried her apologies across the Canal: she has media to attend to. ‘I’m not an ambitious young biographer like Richard Holmes planning a Shelley door-stopper, but a few new facts would help. The Danieli couldn’t care less.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t look expensive. Bet you didn’t buy a drink.’

  ‘My grant doesn’t stretch that far. But they did confirm their records were given away or sold. According to Anna-Maria, the colleague who arranged my apartment, the Italian scholar with the register lives in Rome and visits Venice. She tried tracking him down for me but he’s elusive. Does he have it, did he lose it – or burn it? Is it an investment gathering value? Did he invent it – or rather Shelley’s name on it? I’m beginning not to care.’

  ‘Not a scholarly position,’ laughs Rachel. ‘He’s probably a Henry James reader and thinks you’re an American scoundrel from The Aspern Papers, trying to filch his material. Remember, Aspern was really Shelley.’ She pauses, clearing her throat, ‘Actually, the Danieli only became a hotel in 1822.’

  ‘Right,’ says Thomas. ‘Settles that.’

  After a decent pause, Rachel changes the topic. ‘I’ve been thinking how often the Romantics asked, “What is life?” We don’t do that now.’

  ‘Should think not,’ says Annie, ‘idle chatter of a transcendental kind.’

  ‘But we do,’ says Fran, struggling to swallow sardines in soar – disobliged by Jane Austen’s snickering about stinking fish in Southampton – ‘those self-help books and science-of-life courses.’

  ‘All poetry,’ says Annie, dying for a fag. She wonders why, with the windows open and a rich smell of coffee and garlic in the little restaurant, an aroma of Gauloises wouldn’t enhance the mélange. ‘Love, hate, joy, fear, all poetry.’

  ‘If nicely expressed,’ says Rachel, noting Annie’s twitchy hand. ‘Since we must devote the final days to Shelley and Mary, we should get going tomorrow on some sightseeing. While Thomas labours, of course.’

  ‘Eating too,’ says Annie. ‘I’ve brought restaurant guides.’

  ‘Throw them out,’ says Rachel, ‘never any good. They follow the peak.’

  ‘I bet Annie could make this fish stew,’ remarks Fran.

  Annie chuckles. ‘It’s in the sauce. They must grind up all the old leftover fish and some spices and ecco! You couldn’t easily make it at home, you’d need so many different fishy bits from sea-bream chunks to a topping of langoustine.’

  ‘Maybe Waitrose will sell all the ingredients on one counter, along with the recipe on a laminated card.’

  ‘So where’s the fun?’

  The talk bores Thomas. Was it a good idea to travel with these desultory old women – again? He excuses himself after the main course. The others exchange smiles as he leaves, tapping out a text on his phone.

  That night Fran and Annie regret their island lodging with lagoon view. Outside their windows on the little ledge local youths settle to smoke and flirt to the sound of pulsing music.

  ‘We don’t have enough language to say fuck off,’ moans Annie by email.

  ‘No,’ says Fran, putting her bedside light back on, then watching the shadow of a moth fluttering on her wall.

  Despite the disturbed night she rises early. She sits at her window facing the lagoon, fascinated by a world at work.

  Noisy rubbish boats pass in shades of green and turquoise, their minders in matching colours; red and blue worker-barges deliver fruit, armchairs, toilet rolls and bottled water; red and green service boats prepare to dredge and pound in stakes like sharpened pencils, their drivers enjoying the early-morning sun, one hand on a wheel, the other gesticulating with a cigarette into a hidden phone; taxis are groomed; smart boats ferry guests to and from expensive island hotels so rich buttocks never touch a public seat; stylish Guardia Finanza police speed after money launderers and tax evaders.

  Fran watches as the sun rises farther making little orange puffs in the sky, complementing, not ousting, the moon. Exercisers emerge, rowing gondola-style in crooked lines or jogging along the ledge by the window, disturbing seagulls pecking at waste left by the revellers.

  A boy in yellow vest rides his bucking blue-striped speedboat like a frisky horse, making a single river through the lagoon. In its wake, an empty cruise boat bobs sedately, two men smoking under the awning. Between disturbances the lagoon ripples and shimmers in tide-like patterns; water smooths and clouds over the detritus of bones, boats, plastic bottles and tin cans.

  At the end of the platform a fisherman, heavy rumped like the Old Man of the Sea with red cap and bushy white beard, settles himself for the morning.

  Jane Austen mocks this list of particulars. My vision was more abstract, more memorable. She pushes Fran towards her astute watching women, from Elinor Dashwood to the two Charlottes.

  Fran waves away both Author and characters.

  Yet she doesn’t lack a literary companion: involuntarily she sees the rising sun with Shelley’s eyes, bathing everything in ‘aerial gold’.

  Perfect, she thinks, everything’s perfect.

  Except for the lack of tea-making equipment.

  Maybe Italians are so sociable they never believe a solitary person in a single room wants to drink morning tea alone or brew in the witching hour.

  She stops watching as she hears Annie stirring next door. By now the sky is exhausting, too bluely close.

  22

  After breakfast, Annie and Fran walk towards the outer door of the small hotel. They notice a woman standing at reception. She speaks a Dutch-accented English. In her sixties, slender and straight-backed, she wears little black shorts over brick-coloured stockings.

  ‘Stylish,’ says Annie.

  ‘Daring,’ says Fran. ‘I couldn’t do it. Not even with those legs.’

  Annie glances at Fran’s uncompromising Toast dress and laughs. Fran laughs too and pats Annie’s arm.

  They meet Rachel and Tamsin by the wooden Accademia Bridge. Rachel knows Venice better than any of them but hides the fact. As a teenager she’d been wearied by a round of churches, art galleries and expensive sugary snacks which her ludicrously thin mother kept scoffing. She was urged on by the hired guide, probably cousin to the café-owners. Rachel took in the town when her child-mind was fluid and knowledge penetrated; now she’s sad to find she feels so little before what everyone else admires. Experience can be burdensome.

  They set off for the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, going down one alley, then another, past façades with statuary high in the sky for birds and angels to appreciate. When Annie asks the way, she provokes the invariable response, ‘Sempre diritto,’ and a shrug.

  Weary, they stop for coffee and unhealthy brioche, orange jam poked in its middle.

  ‘Flour, fat, and sugar,’ laughs Tamsin, ‘we wouldn’t touch it in England. I guess it feels like exotic here.’

  ‘I love doughnuts,’ says Fran thinking of Johnnie with strawberry jam up his nose.

  ‘By the way, where the fuck are we?’

  ‘Where we’re supposed to be,’ Fran chuckles under her breath forgetting Tamsin has young, unwaxy ears.

  ‘Glad someone knows,’ says Tamsin, waving her phone whose map has led them to this café in a calle ending in a canal with no side exit or bridge.

  Rachel grins, takes a sip of her bottled water, then puts them right.

  They arrive by the Museum. Annie has visited before, likes the building and its random contents. Rachel finds memories jangling: Peggy Guggenheim reminds her of her spoilt mother.

  Fran interrupts her thoughts by m
aking a fuss about leaving her backpack at the ticket counter though she carries nothing important in it. Annie pushes round her to give in her own bag. Feeling a little absurd, Fran hands over her backpack. They enter together.

  Annie and Tamsin are keenest to respond, chat and judge, noting the likeable, the meretricious, the autobiographical. With a penchant for Rosa Bonheur’s cows and Victorian genre paintings of workhouse paupers, Fran has so little sense of modern art that the abstractions, the clever plays of light and shade, of dark and texture, of white and white, leave her cold and inarticulate. She likes only Magritte’s night-time house under a daytime sky: full of insomniacs.

  The galleries are crowded – not so Annie, Rachel and Tamsin notice, but Fran’s twitchy. She watches girls with unbelievable teeth and straight blond hair sashaying through the rooms attentive only to their phones, snapping pictures and themselves.

  One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

  You forget, remarks Jane Austen, that Claude glasses tinted a scene so it became a Gilpin picturesque for tourists. Any different?

  Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott watches life in a mirror until jolted by trivial Sir Lancelot, tirra-lilling by her island. The Lady stops looking in the mirror, only then discovering what eluded her all those spinning years: that the mirror makes better scenes than anything found outside, that some fusty notion of life being better than art has tricked her into destroying herself when she could have gone on spinning and singing and watching shadows into contented, undramatic old age.

  Bring it up to date: the Lady stops looking into a mobile phone. What good does it do her?

  Just remember to enter recto and exit verso if you want to stay on Shalott.

  Annie interrupts Fran’s reverie. ‘You’re not used to crowds. London exhibitions are far worse.’

  Fran smiles but doesn’t answer. As Annie turns to join Rachel in front of a Max Ernst monstrosity, she slips off to find the museum shop. Comfortingly familiar with its National-Trust-type mugs, tea towels, T-shirts and children’s pop-up books, she buys a Jackson Pollock scarf, preferring the scarf to the picture. When in folds round her neck, it looks ordinary, but she’s cheered by the extravagance.