Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  Rachel isn’t listening. ‘Unlikely he sabotaged his craft – and not even a genius-poet could raise a storm. He could, though, take advantage of it.’

  Thomas is bursting to interrupt. Shelley knows about boats, for God’s sake. He’s building a steamboat with cylinders, boiler and ironwork. He’s only stopped by lack of funds (as usual).

  But this is a sailboat formed for the excitement of storms and tumbling speed.

  He knows about sailboats too.

  Little rain for weeks. The weather sultry in that ominous Northern Italian way. Enough to make the most light-hearted dismal. Shelley and Mary are not getting on. He’s writing powerful gloomy poetry – of no financial worth (though deep in debt) – and beautiful love lyrics to another woman. He wants to buy Prussic acid – not for immediate suicide, mind. Having just dangerously miscarried, Mary’s depressed and irritable. Shelley may leave her. (Post-Shelley, she’ll massage these last days.) Remembering Harriet: rejection falls heavily on women. (Death not so much.)

  The voyage out lacks incident, not the voyage back.

  The boat’s a double-masted ketch, adapted for speed. A friend and a teenage boy as deckhand accompany Shelley – had he pierced holes, as some critics suspect, he’d have been a murderer.

  On that day, from being serene, the sky frays, clouds scud and hide the sun: thunder, fog, everything the heavens can throw descends.

  Is there such a storm?

  Sails become too full; some are hastily furled. The boat goes sideways on the wind.

  An Italian captain offers help. It’s refused.

  Did this happen?

  In mist and smashing rain, the boat is rammed by another vessel for robbery.

  Perhaps – or is this an extenuating lie devised by the man who helped modify the heavy boat for speed, fatally wounding its structure? He’s the only source.

  So many questions mark an insecure narration, a too passionate involvement, interjects Jane Austen. Like my Marianne Dashwood accosting Willoughby at the London party.

  Fran bats her Author away. Emotional fashions change. Marianne Dashwood’s an online heroine, the scream you muffled is now heard loud and clear.

  To Rachel’s surprise, Thomas mutters, ‘You know – I’m not now sure. Why the Prussic acid? Does Shelley carry it onto the boat?’

  It takes a young man to suspect another’s fatal enthralment. Thomas smooths his hair and smiles. Unlike fiction, biography is ragged.

  Shelley drowns with the others – how little we care for them. He’s swollen into meat for sharks and dogfish …

  ‘The fish he most hated.’

  Eight days on, the corpse washes ashore, face and arms eaten, flesh and bones decayed. An old rag retains its form longer than a dead body, Byron will note.

  The black single-breasted jacket though torn is recognised, the shirt, bits of buff-coloured nankeen trousers, black boots and silk white stockings.

  Both Shelley and his wife Harriet, long in the water, are identified by what they wear.

  In the jacket pocket – handy proof that art, or artefact in this case, survives human mortality – the leather binding of Keats’s Lamia, damaged when perhaps Shelley pushed at it while drowning. In the instant of real death, might death be less alluring, willed or otherwise?

  *

  The hot time of the year, the remains putrefy. Genoan quarantine laws demand covering in lime and quick burial. Leftovers are dug into the sand, an old pine root marking the spot.

  In Elan Valley there was a dead tree …

  It’s too close to the lapping sea. So, a month later, the stinking bits are exhumed to suffer pagan burning before assembled friends. Laid on an iron furnace under logs of wood, with wine, oil, salt and frankincense to counteract the smell of putrefaction. Edward Trelawny, corny old raconteur, impresario and techni-colour literary liar, who will dine out on Byron and Shelley the rest of his long life, concocts last rites.

  Byron is hot – noonday sun is fierce, fire intensifies the heat. He swims off.

  Annie interrupts Rachel. ‘Years later Louis Eduard Fournier paints him in Byronic posture on a cold windswept (English?) beach. He contemplates the pyre with its body of intact head, hands and feet – in fact hands and feet were severed and no flesh remained on the blackened skull. Fournier adds a kneeling Mary in the background. She wasn’t there.’

  Trelawny claims Byron complimented him on his pagan incantation, ‘I restore to nature through fire the elements of which this man was composed, earth, air and water; everything is changed, but not annihilated; he is now a portion of that which he worshipped.’ Byron’s compliment is implausible.

  ‘The fire takes time to catch,’ says Thomas. ‘Then it burns for hours, the lime producing phosphorescent blue flames. Shelleyan radiance. Bones fall apart, remains are cooked in their own oiliness. Atoms disperse into the air, a single bird flies away. A nice touch.’

  A curlew, a vulture?

  Annie looks quizzically at Thomas, ‘Yeats says, “The living can assist the imagination of the dead.” Trelawny, Fournier, now you.’

  Jane Austen grimaces. A sad, slightly ridiculous account. No irony needed, no joke, but some discreet distancing. Death is common, fabling commonplace.

  ‘One day Byron will remark that his own brains are boiling, “as Shelley’s did” when he was grilled,’ adds Annie.

  The conservative newspaper, the Courier, is even less decorous: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Tamsin, ‘his mates like get bits as keepsakes. Mary wrapped the heart in silk gauze. Trelawny burns his hand snatching it – so he claims, though no one saw him. More like a liver.’ The offal ends up in Bournemouth.

  ‘Trelawny takes a slice of jawbone with teeth sockets for himself. Later, fragments of skull circulate, to be kissed by fans.’

  My point about reliquaries, says Jane Austen. These friends sound a little touched. It’s as well I had a Christian burial. We’re not Catholics or Hindus.

  A lock of your hair – rather discoloured by yeast – was recently auctioned in Gloucestershire, whispers Fran.

  Quite different. Hair is given voluntarily as gift for rings and lockets. What you describe is irreverent, morbid.

  You didn’t give it, Fran retorts, you aren’t Marianne Dashwood. Cassandra snipped the hair when you were dead, before the coffin was closed.

  The Author is silenced. Then she remarks, There’s a place for reverential curating – a pressed violet, Crabbe’s bright blue damselfly – but not human parts.

  ‘I’m amazed,’ says Fran ‘there was anything of Shelley left to bury in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Our baby girl remains intact.’

  As far as we know.

  If death is harsh, once dead everyone can seem at peace. Like her father’s spirit, little Clara’s goes to

  some world far from ours

  Where moonlight & music & feeling

  Are one.

  No one follows this. Is the tone right, for once?

  Fran feels a prick of emotion and wonders if she’s trying to channel the sad dead grandma.

  That’s what comes of living in your head and the dribblings of books, warns Jane Austen, now recovered from the taunt of purloined hair.

  Yet Fran’s heartened by the idea of Clara’s splendid lineage. Buried in an unmarked grave perhaps, yet still granddaughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Something, yes?

  Granddaughter too of a baronet, the kind of classy thing that matters in England.

  Annie’s trying to dislodge a linseed stuck between her back teeth since breakfast. However she swishes her tongue, she can’t move it. ‘We could designate a spot,’ she suggests. ‘Like they do in colleges, deciding on a room to claim for a famous author. National Trust houses with beds Elizabeth or Mary Queen of Scots slept in. Like Rachel said about the Danieli.’

  Suddenly turning from the sea, Rachel startles them all by squatting and setting down
her water bottle. ‘I’ve brought candles and matches.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ says Thomas walking slightly apart with Tamsin, who’s been checking her phone.

  Rachel fixes her candles in the sand and tries to light them, while Fran and Annie stoop to shield them from the breeze.

  ‘What are those old women doing?’ a child’s high-pitched English voice rings out.

  The mother walks behind Annie and Fran without their seeing her. ‘A ceremony of some sort,’ she says, embarrassed. ‘Come away, Imogen.’

  Yet she herself remains close. ‘My father-in-law wanted his ashes thrown off Bardsey Island,’ she says to their backs. ‘We had to hire a boat and go to all sorts of trouble. By the end we were so cold we didn’t care. We threw the ashes overboard, but they blew back in our faces.’

  Fran turns, smiling, ‘He’s still with you then.’

  ‘Sort of,’ laughs the woman. She takes the child’s hand and pulls her away.

  The candles have flickered out, Rachel walks to the seashore, carrying her sandals. When she returns, Fran notices her toenails are varnished green. Her groomed face is untethered.

  ‘I know that, whoever came with the corpse to the Lido – and I accept, Thomas, that all would be done properly – it can’t have been Mary. But let me for a moment imagine that it was and do another death.’

  They’re silent. Fran looks encouragingly at Rachel. Annie lights a cigarette and pats the air to ensure her smoke goes seawards like Shelley’s floating ashes. Thomas exchanges glances with Tamsin, who’s circling her head on her long neck.

  The bundle is wrapped in blue cloth. Mary holds it to her breast like the baby it is, while Shelley digs the sand, just far enough from the sea to avoid water gushing in. He goes deep if not six feet. The bundle is small. Only the lull in digging tells Mary he’s finished. He’s a little exhilarated as well as sweaty from the effort – he always responds acutely to heavy exercise. Distressed too – Mary and Shelley, deep down one single ‘tempest tost’ bark. Her head is close to the body she clutches and she doesn’t look up to catch his eye. After the stillness and silence has lasted too long, she steps forward, too hollowed out to cry. She kneels beside the hole already filling with fine sand and, stretching her arms from her breast, lowers the little child down.

  Suddenly Rachel’s kneeling by the snuffed candles. ‘My baby,’ she sobs, her head bowing forwards. The sand absorbs her tears. ‘My baby,’ she moans again.

  I knew where it would end, sighs Jane Austen.

  Back for the night in the hotel, Fran and Annie see a gap on the waterfront where the gypsy boat had been. Petrol stains the flagstones. When they meet the waitress, they ask what happened. She shrugs. She doesn’t know whether it was the police or just locals who edged them away, out into the lagoon. They made no fuss.

  After their motor refused to start, a local man kick-started it with a lead from the hotel. Off they chugged in their little house, travelling the blue water, criss-crossing proper paths laid out for civic boats. Wet washing flapping from a string line, the ragged dog standing on the stern.

  What sort of dog? It’d be a lurcher in England.

  Fran’s sad she missed their going, though perhaps one glimpse of the older man stripping to a kind of thong and soaping himself so frankly was enough. The mess would have grown, making more indelible stains. But still, she’s a teeny bit envious, as she is of Agafia. That ability to want and stand a loose, uncomfortable, free life.

  Agafia doesn’t live in the sun by a famous lagoon but in the tundra – though that too is hotting up with global warming. After thirty years of isolation, she goes on encouraging the Rapture with her ritual of bows and prayers.

  Fran looks towards the darkening water: lagoon, Lido and Elan lakes all wishy-washy in her mind. It must be heart-breaking to wait like that.

  Have the gypsies been hurt by their lack of welcome on firm ground? Wanderers are always resented by the securely settled. Remember the Romani suffering their Devouring?

  Bet the old man can whistle through a fish scale.

  Annie’s unmoved, ‘Just messy travellers.’ She’s recollecting with distaste the scene on the beach, Rachel doing a Trelawney. Theatrical, like the Master’s thespian cortege. Her own griefs are the most pressing, but she’s kept her equanimity; she’d never stage such intoxicated shows. Why be so censorious? Is she affronted by other people being moved by themselves? ‘I must go to bed,’ she says, but stays sitting in Fran’s room. ‘Do you think Rachel has a shrink?’

  ‘Dunno,’ says Fran. ‘Julie once went to a class where she had to imagine her young self, meet her on the road, then embrace her as everyone wants to be embraced by grown-ups.’

  ‘The baby she buried might be herself, you mean?’

  Fran shrugs. She remembers the feel of her hands on Rachel’s warm back as she knelt; the others shifting their feet away from what one critic, attuned to Jane Austen’s mockery of silly novels, called ‘the distraction scene’.

  Annie still sits on Fran’s bed as light finally fails. If they hadn’t such a horror of sentiment, she’s sure they’d be holding hands.

  Fran smiles and stretches out an open palm.

  Part Five

  29

  ‘Is it too neat a structure?’ asks Annie. ‘Making a life based on pooled damage?’ She waves her cigarette through the window, then stubs it out. Smoke wafts back into the Cam riverside café. ‘Just because we’ve spent some hols together, beguiling ourselves with dreamy Percy Bysshe, doesn’t necessarily mean …’ She shrugs.

  ‘Damage pooled might be damage squared,’ warns Fran.

  We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days, says Jane Austen.

  ‘I wasn’t great at math but I see no reason it can’t cancel itself out,’ chuckles Rachel. ‘Minuses multiplied. We wouldn’t have to live entirely with the absent if we had other company.’

  Annie and Fran are apprehensive. Rachel’s running away with the idea.

  If no one runs, we all stand still.

  ‘Come on,’ says Rachel, ‘everyone who’s arrived at our age has bruises. Let me try putting it together. So, I gave birth to a dead baby, I’d been kicked downstairs, I went through childbirth when he was already dead. If I hadn’t had a bulimic, alcoholic, drug-addled mother who makes analysis her life’s meaning, I might have sought more help and not taken it so hard.’ She smiles to leaven her words, the others look down, hoping she’ll not make each of them a calamity paragraph. She goes on, ‘Fran’s husband drove his car into the water, his car becomes like Shelley’s boat with speculative holes, but …’

  ‘He didn’t take the car,’ interrupts Fran. ‘I asked him to go, well once, before he did.’

  Startled by the new variant, Annie says, ‘It doesn’t upset Rachel’s point.’

  The wet days, the Welsh mud in the seams of her hiking boots, still haunt Rachel. ‘I guess I think of Fran’s lost husband in Elan reservoir.’

  Fran scowls. Mildly amusing to create a past; uncomfortable to meet it alive and talking.

  ‘I destroyed my father,’ says Annie. ‘Is that what you want to say, Rachel? I haven’t told you this, Fran, but I guess now … You knew Zach never got the Honorary Degree. A small thing but it rankled, ate him up, he wanted to be part of the Oxbridge world while despising it – he called it a court-orchestra – he even flirted with a skinny Dame Professor to get past the Council. Well, I kiboshed it with hints of plagiarism. OK, Fran, that doesn’t grab you, you don’t care a fig for our cliquey clubs and honours. You want me to say I didn’t pay enough attention to my children.’

  ‘Some confessional orgy,’ Fran smirks to hide alarm.

  Clumsy, whispers Jane Austen, giving her full-on sardonic look. Keeping back, then tendering truth is not a fictional crime. You live in your story, you adapt to its manners. No human being has omniscience, not even an Author.

  Fran sees tears in Rachel’s eyes. As likely to be for Percy Bysshe’s teenage brides, their lost babes, An
nie’s abandoned children, her absent fatherless boy, as for her own stillborn child. It’s the way of feelings. What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba/That he should weep for her? says Hamlet, surprised.

  She tries to remove the created memory of Andrew’s floating, then sinking body but finds the image smudging. Rachel carries off trauma, if that’s what it is, so much better, she thinks, unaware of her new friend’s hidden crutch: Sweetpapers, those stories that stylishly skewer a narcissist mother – note, reader, the aggressively fond dedication – and dissolve vindictive men.

  (Had Annie seen this while on the Shelley trail in Venice, she’d have recollected his hostile praise of Byron, whose power tramples Shelley into a ‘worm beneath the sod’.)

  The conversation wanes. Rachel wipes her eyes, ‘I tear easily,’ she says, ‘ignore.’

  Is this what happens to women’s talk with no man present, they speak over each other, echo, agree, get emotional and fall silent?

  Jane Austen explodes. Sentimental claptrap! Women are rational creatures. They may be more inconsequential in mixed company, but imbecilities are not limited to one sex.

  You try to make a new family and it acts just like the old one, thinks Annie. What a surprise! Nietzsche despised the family’s crushing traditions. Would they be reconstituting them if they set up together? Would they fall into the mawkish piety he predicted? Or would they try to do a Virginia Woolf and tesselate themselves into the body of one complete human being? Merge identities?

  Unlikely.

  ‘We should stop whingeing about the past I guess you’re saying, Rachel.’ Hoping to erase her earlier discordant impression, Fran adds, ‘Yes, but sometimes there’s an eruption if words aren’t allowed out whenever – you know, so long rehearsed and perfected.’ She smiles at the slight raising of Annie’s left eyebrow. ‘There’d be a thinning audience, of course. Maybe we could learn not to cry at our own pathos. I don’t mean you specifically,’ she adds, catching Rachel’s wet eyes.