Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  A burst of sunlight dazzles the glass in the window. A knock on the door, Rachel enters, astonishing them both.

  ‘Gorgeous here,’ she says.

  Fran smiles. ‘Go on with you. Not your sort of place.’

  ‘No, well, where is?’

  She plops down on the bed, one buttock on Annie’s open phrasebook. ‘I popped into the Danieli last night after what Thomas said about it. My mother and I stayed there decades ago when she was a troubled teenager.’

  ‘She was?’

  ‘Yup, Mother never made it to adulthood. I however was always grown up. Anyway, we stayed there, very grand and sombre. We ate oysters, lobster and little quails, an amuse bouche of pea cream and lagoon shrimp, and all manner of good delicate things, nothing quite having the perfect taste. Then Mother binged on sugar outside in the campi, as well as pills and alcohol of course. She wanted to seem literary and arty and kept saying, with her mouth full of shellfish that would soon be in the toilet bowl, how fascinating it was that George Sand and Alfred de Musset stayed there, in room 10, I think she said. No reason. I had the brochure too and I remember saying, Proust and Balzac as well, and Shelley and Byron in room 13, figuring she’d read none of them and no one knew where any of them stayed – in the last two cases, certainly not here. “Clever little mouse,” she said to me holding my arm as we stepped down the golden stairway, supposedly doing a mother-daughter thing for onlookers. Actually, she was unsteady and wanted my support.’

  Annie’s astonished: even when directly questioned, Rachel’s been reticent; why this now?

  To Fran the reminiscence sounds rehearsed.

  ‘Time for the Lido,’ says Annie after a pause. ‘Shall we go to your place for coffee en route?’

  Visualising her four-poster bed with its Fortuny brocade hangings, the red velvet chaise by the high window, the ornate mirrors, Rachel replies, ‘Nah, easier to go direct to San Zaccaria before we lose steam.’

  ‘Have we everything we need by way of texts, info and paper hankies?’ asks Annie.

  Fran invites Jane Austen along, using the jocular tone she associates with the sisterly letters.

  I didn’t deal in dead babies.

  Persuasion? Sir Walter Eliot’s dead heir.

  Never born.

  Mrs Hall producing a dead child because she may have seen her husband?

  No private correspondence can bear the eye of others, begins Jane Austen.

  I’d never sink to that.

  ‘Sink to what?’ asks Rachel.

  ‘Just a passing thought,’ answers Fran. She blows her nose.

  Life’s in dialogue, remember, Jane Austen says helpfully. You have others here to obscure the chatter.

  ‘We have to go by the Anglican church for Thomas,’ Fran reminds Rachel and Annie.

  When they arrive at the campo beside little St George’s, Rachel walks off to look through a reflecting shop window. Unexpectedly, Shelley’s troubling her. He thinks he can arrest moments with words, but is careless of the particular moment of a child’s life. The real palpable living thing doesn’t affect him, just the being of his mind, the being in words: desire and regret rather than experience. Is this a way to live? Recollecting her own emotion before the unknown choirboy in King’s Chapel, she presses her hand on the glass.

  ‘I can’t take another pious interior,’ exclaims Annie, waving a hand towards the church. ‘You go Fran, it’s your world. What’s the point anyway?’

  ‘Not much. Just possibly there might be records of dead Brits.’

  Fran enters alone, makes enquiries and learns the place became an Anglican church only in 1892. She returns with one modest fact: the tombstone of Consul Joseph Smith on the wall is from the Lido burying-ground.

  ‘I’d hoped for better things from the Anglican community,’ says Thomas when he hears.

  Prone to flooding and always windswept, the Lido was never desirable for burial, its sole advantage being its inclusiveness: anyone could go under there. Yet, the excluded are segregated: Protestants and Jews of course, but also Muslims and condemned criminals.

  I never wanted that pompous tomb and plaque in Winchester, Jane Austen interrupts. I wished to be laid to rest in the modest Chawton churchyard where my mother and dear sister would have joined me when their time came.

  The dead don’t choose, whispers Fran, a grave’s for the living.

  A strange idea: you deny the will of the dead to dispose of its most intimate possession.

  ‘Whenever I get information from Italian officials or scholars,’ grumbles Thomas as they assemble for the trip, ‘it turns out wrong or obfuscating.’

  ‘Maybe our truth isn’t theirs,’ laughs Tamsin chewing.

  Where does she put the used gum? Does she swallow it – how would it move through the intestines? Or does she discreetly spit it out, wrap it like dog poo to throw away later? Fran’s puzzling the questions when Tamsin blows and pops a bubble, releasing a smell of chemical strawberry.

  They laugh. ‘I guess you guys want me to be younger than I am,’ she says moving the wodge of gum into her cheek. ‘I got this bubble gum specially to complement my uptick.’

  ‘The fact is,’ announces Thomas, ‘that 1818 is from an in-between period. Current arrangements on San Michele date from the late 1870s. The layers of history in this town are scrambled.’

  ‘Same everywhere,’ says Fran. ‘Bubbles advertises Pears’ Soap. Then Pears is taken over by Sunlight Soap, so Millais’s picture is in the Port Sunlight gallery on the Wirral. You wouldn’t expect that, would you?’

  27

  The vaporetto to the Lido across the Bacino and southern lagoon is exhilarating. They stand on the platform, unusually free of tourist groups; water and wind swish past.

  It’s a holiday, thinks Fran. I am on holiday with my four friends. Five Go Adventuring.

  Thomas waves his hands in excitement. ‘I’ve got a footnote,’ he exclaims, ‘or something for Notes & Queries. Look at San Servolo island over there. Scholars think this is where Byron and Shelley meet the Maniac in “Julian and Maddalo”. But the poem describes only one belfry tower, clearly there are two there. The madhouse must be on the other island way over there, see, only one tower.’

  ‘This really matters, Thomas, unlike the Danieli?’ chuckles Fran.

  ‘It most certainly does,’ snorts Annie.

  Indeed so, whispers Jane Austen, it matters in art whether there are hedgerows in Northamptonshire. Less so in life.

  Emma’s apple blossom in June?

  Some moments call for your ‘soft-focus’. Would I be ‘everybody’s dear Jane’ without it?

  ‘All art as fabulous as the island of Shallot,’ insists Rachel. ‘Words have to have autonomy.’

  If she had a couple of double gins inside her, Annie might have responded, ‘Fucking creative writing!’

  The boat stops at Santa Maria Elisabetta; they alight before realising they could have stayed on until San Nicolò, nearer the burying-grounds. But the walk in the morning sun is pleasant.

  Dodging cars, buses and hired tricycles, they pass hotels, cafés, bars, beaches with different coloured parasols twirling in the breeze, shops selling bikinis, cigarettes and ice cream.

  Yet, as they go beyond the most commercial areas, nearing their goal, they feel something wild lingering – as if to say, this string of leisure joys just might be washed clean away with a great wave of water.

  Like Rhayader if the stone dams fail.

  Thomas reiterates his warning. The Jewish cemetery is set apart and guarded, but much of the area for other aliens was dug up to create an airstrip. All they’ll get is atmosphere – and little of that. ‘Show them your pictures, Tamsin,’ he concludes. ‘Old Protestant tombstones are stacked behind the Jewish cemetery on the edge of a new Catholic one. Not easy to get there but someone took pictures. These and Fran’s British consul are all we’ve got.’

  ‘Right,’ says Tamsin cocking her head. ‘The images show a few tombstones restored with f
unding from Venice in Peril and the French Committee. There’s like more info on the web, but,’ shrugging, ‘it’s kind of boring, antiquarian stuff.’

  ‘In short, we’ve nothing to see here.’

  Contrariwise, all to imagine.

  ‘Forget the artefacts,’ says Rachel, ‘get back to the story.’

  ‘Yeah, the dead baby,’ says Tamsin. ‘I’m up for it. I should but don’t care for archives, Thomas.’

  ‘I bought you an ice cream in payment,’ he replies, a loving look sliding into his face for all to see.

  ‘OK,’ says Annie, turning away.

  Tamsin bounds on ahead, her brown soapy-smooth body in its tight white shorts the very image of vitality and joy. Fran drags her eyes sideways.

  ‘First step, the record. The baby dies. Not a new-born but a child, more than a year old. A small, but not very small body. You wrap it in a sheet, a blanket, an old shirt? You hire a gondola to row you and the bundle to the Lido.’

  ‘All this in a town full of rules and regulations,’ Fran interrupts Rachel, ‘where Mary and her dying child were stopped at Fusina for lack of paperwork.’

  Jane Austen clears her throat, I gave the opinion on England and its neighbourhood of voluntary spies to my hero Henry Tilney, not entirely trustworthy but an effective storyteller and a man of common sense. I would expect that Venice, a city of masks and spying, would be thick with surveillance. You do well to doubt this improbable, indeed absurd, story.

  Shelley, Mary, Byron, a whole party of other men and women – or just Shelley with his bundle? – walk on the sand, perhaps in wind and rain, perhaps in baking sunlight which must even in so short a time attack that tiny body. Or is it night-time so they see by flares and torches?

  Tamsin catches the last words. ‘Prot burials at night,’ she says. ‘Found that on my archive morning, well, in Rome anyway.’

  ‘Whatever the climate and light, someone digs a hole in the sand and puts the child in. Can we see women at the scene?’

  Rachel is imagining too keenly. Annie frowns, ‘Is this being done as history or fiction?’

  ‘Or vision?’ says Fran. ‘Shelley imagines his own death in a desert place under a great moon.’

  ‘Did he,’ pursues Rachel, ‘think of his baby as “A fragile lute … quenched for ever,/Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now”?’

  ‘Doubtful. He kept the better poetry for himself.’

  ‘The best lines are these,’ says Rachel:

  ‘Heartless things

  Are done and said i’ the world, and many worms

  And beasts and men live on.’

  ‘He can hit the nail when he wants to,’ says Fran, touching Rachel’s arm.

  His own imagined death is a peaceful fading, nothing as undignified as pain and filth. Little Ca dies in agony, in convulsions. But the burial place fits Shelley’s visions of poetic deaths, liminal spots of water and unstable land.

  ‘Precarious,’ says Fran.

  Uneasy at the sistering, Thomas says, ‘Let’s try to look at it from Shelley’s point of view.’

  That, thinks Fran, is rather daring in the circumstances.

  ‘Shelley and a couple of friends, maybe Byron, along with the British consul or a clergyman and a grave digger, would have gone to the Protestant place on the Lido by night. A hole is dug in the sand and a baby inserted. The hole is filled. Then all, including Shelley, return in the gondola to – somewhere. Shelley has a drink perhaps, watches a Venetian sunset.’

  His tone surprises Fran and Rachel. Matter of fact, outraged, querying?

  Jane Austen whispers, At last you may be getting somewhere in this macabre business.

  ‘So,’ says Fran, ‘you continue your poetic career. There will be another child to kill before you’re through, this is the second dead one.’

  If you discount the child drowned in the Serpentine in Harriet’s belly.

  ‘God!’ Tamsin sniggers, addressing Annie. ‘You guys used to preach that scholarship needed detachment. We never believed you.’

  ‘Venice doesn’t let death settle,’ says Rachel. ‘Remember Henry James, who drove (so some assume) Constance Fenimore Woolson to suicide? He tries to dispose of her dark silk dresses by having himself rowed out onto the lagoon in a gondola, then throwing them overboard. They billow out and won’t sink, floating on the surface around the boat. Filling with water like live bodies.’

  ‘You supplied that image, Rachel,’ chuckles Annie. ‘No evidence Henry James thought of dresses as living or dead bodies, he was just nonplussed by all this female stuff. Though he could have given them to the poor; drowning them is pretty theatrical.’

  ‘Mary can’t have come, I feel sure,’ says Fran. ‘Italy will be the graveyard of her children. She must fear for little William. Does she recall Harriet’s son and daughter? They survived babyhood because their genius father absconded.’

  ‘Not for the burial of course, women don’t,’ says Thomas. ‘But a couple of days later she went to the Lido and met Byron. He may have comforted her by the little grave. Why are you making these men into monsters?’

  Annie’s bored. She says, ‘After Shelley dies, Mary recaps the storm of misery that’s engulfed her life in Italy. She remembers Clara asleep “on bleak Lido, near Venetian seas”. That settles the place, if we ever doubted.’ She wants to walk to the seaside and let hot sand run between bare toes.

  They arrive at the locked gate of the Hebrew cemetery, stare through, then scramble across scrubby terrain along barbed wire where the desecrated Protestants might have been. The going’s tough and they give up – far too easily, as Thomas assumed they would. But he’s been humoured for most of this trip by his female retinue and won’t insist on their persevering. He dampens down the desire that often rises embarrassingly when he thinks of Tamsin, even within this odd quartet.

  They regain the road, retrace some steps, then turn off towards the shore through prickly undergrowth. The smudged and mottled sand is matted with thistles and amphibious weeds. Nearer the sea the sand becomes light and fly-away.

  ‘Wherever Clara was buried, it must have been in restless sand like this,’ says Rachel. She walks on ahead, then turns to address the stragglers. ‘It’s a terrible place to be left, by so much water, the lagoon one side, the sea on the other. When he describes watery death, Shelley thinks only of himself, not his child.’

  Distrusting the accelerating emotion, Thomas answers levelly, ‘She’ll be buried in the cemetery, why ever not? But it’s true, we have no account of it. Letters and journals are missing. So let’s return to Shelley and Byron on the Lido. Perhaps they ride where the baby will be buried, then is buried. “Julian and Maddalo” is finished long after the first intoxicating outing, so it remains strange that dead Clara makes no entry. The only child in the poem is Claire’s daughter, the lovely “toy”, his “special favourite”.’

  ‘Allegra, who’s caused such misery to Mary, the child his own has been sacrificed for,’ snaps Rachel.

  Thomas had intended using this trip to impress Rachel, but their views are diverging as they hadn’t in Wales. He’s not ingratiating himself. He turns the subject, ‘Yet there is a sense of death in that poem, a swirling of sand and sea that suggests human dissolution, even if not focused on the dead baby. Remember, the poets go off to a lagoon island to meet a “Maniac”. Confined and maddened, the Maniac already seems drowned, his hair swaying in the spray.’

  ‘Another Shelley clone with the usual sad, gentle face,’ sniffs Fran.

  Annie steps in. ‘You know Byron wanted to be buried on the Lido, at least when enthralled by La Guiccioli. He found a good epitaph in a cemetery in Bologna: Implora pace.’

  How often Annie slides towards Byron, Thomas notes again. Byron, the celebrated, charismatic and cruel. He smiles perfunctorily.

  ‘You know the nation’s favourite epitaph?’ asks Fran. ‘ “I told you I was ill.”’

  From behind, Tamsin touches Thomas’s arm, ‘Hey, you’re right, the Man
iac’s kind of dead, and the two poets feel good after their ghoulish meeting. I guess like going to a funeral makes you feel more vital.’

  Rachel is silent. The Maniac’s long moan heaps blame on the woman. Her angry grief makes her want to castrate and mutilate the beloved; supposedly it’s sent him mad. Such double-dyed, multi-gendered guilt and hypocrisy! How difficult, sometimes, not to abandon Shelley altogether. ‘If “Julian and Maddalo” doesn’t deliver a burial ceremony for little Clara,’ she says brightly, ‘should we go back to Shelley’s visions of his own?’

  Thomas shrugs, his eyes on the strip of skin where Tamsin has rolled up her shirt to reveal a glinting navel jewel. He touches the phone in his back pocket, wishing he could record every inch and moment of this elastic, electric body.

  ‘The real one? OK.’

  For Shelley this stormy death was transforming, for us an interruption.

  28

  In July 1822, Shelley is drowned on the opposite coast of Italy: the bay of Lerici in the Gulf of Genoa. He’s anticipated his death in poems of pale poetic alter egos. ‘If you can’t swim/Beware of Providence,’ says Byron–Maddalo to Shelley–Julian.

  ‘Let’s stay with “Lines Written among the Euganean Hills” composed after Clara dies,’ begins Rachel. ‘He becomes a “tempest-cleaving Swan”, welcomed by the sea

  with such emotion

  That its joy grew his, and sprung

  From his lips like music …’

  Inevitably after so much anticipation, you might suspect his end determined. Friends confirm his wish to drown at sea.

  ‘Abandoned Harriet drowned herself in a London lake,’ Fran interrupts. ‘Mary Wollstonecraft (his mother-in-law, remember), also abandoned by her lover, as good as drowned herself in the Thames. A pattern? Though the sea beats a London lake and river, more poetic to go out with the tide.’