Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

‘Oh my God, a fortune teller!’ exclaims Tamsin. ‘I know about astrology. Mum was always reading out her horoscope to Dad while he looked at the cricket results on the back page. Tarot! My friend Harmony …’

  ‘You have a friend called Harmony?’

  ‘Well yeah, her parents thought Melody too common. She’s a City trader.’

  ‘Counterpoint might be classier.’

  ‘I’d go for Fugue,’ says Fran. ‘No one inexpensively educated would know how to spell it. When I tired of it, I’d become an expletive.’

  ‘Good-oh,’ says Tamsin, pirouetting round on flashy striped trainers. ‘It’d be like College with cheaper rent and people to fuss over me and my lovers.’

  ‘Would the children come to stay?’ says Fran.

  ‘What children?’ Tamsin rubs the bottom of her nose with the end of her forefinger.

  Fran and Annie look at her, impressed. Children, life’s centre, the raison d’être of the female body, reduced to a throwaway line.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ says Tamsin. ‘You guys have kids?’

  Daniel and Esther.

  Does Annie regret ignoring them during those hungry productive years? They have good jobs in California and Hong Kong. If there are wounds, no one need open them. Esther was – and presumably still is – what used to be called ‘highly strung’. Fran doubts she’ll be happy anywhere, but, with perpetual sun and multiple therapies, she’ll approximate it in Santa Monica. Daniel, the nervy bullied teenager, now at Investec earns twice or thrice what Johnnie earns. Is Annie embarrassed or proud? Left-wing principles stop at the nursery door. For Christmas, his wife sends identical calendars of the children to Fran and Annie. That tells you something. Who else is on the gift-list?

  Dear, dear Johnnie.

  ‘Don’t worry, they’re older than you and far off. We could have a home-warming party. Let everyone in, then show them the door.’

  ‘A barbecue,’ says Tamsin, ‘with a brazier too. I know where the Uni keeps one for strikes.’

  Thomas is at Annie’s to bless the enterprise, which he only half assumes a joke. ‘Why linger, why turn back,’ he quotes. He seems excited. The women look at him, a little uncomfortable. Is it Tamsin’s involvement? ‘Shelley’s radical commune was to be an enclave of beauty, a love-haven, a Paradise of immortals.’

  Yes, thinks Annie, it is Tamsin. ‘I don’t think we were aiming for anything so exalted,’ she laughs, ‘just a quiet grouping of ladies, spinsters or spinsters manqué. An odd hotchpotch, very English, not untroubled or overblown, trying something, for us, a little different in twilight.’

  Fran and Rachel heard that: twilight. Did Annie really say it? ‘How big will this house be?’ asks Thomas. ‘Nantgwillt, Villa Diodati, or Palazzo Mocenigo?’

  ‘My cottage has two little staircases,’ says Fran.

  ‘Happily,’ says Annie, ‘no chance of us moving in there.’ Then, seeing Fran frown, she adds, ‘And no corridors: good communes need corridors.’

  Thomas grins round, then lets his eyes rest on Rachel. In Venice he’d been repelled by her emotional incontinence – it had reminded him of his mother and mother-in-law, Kiran sometimes. He wonders – never publicly of course – whether women are indeed more hysterical than men. Yet, apart from this one stagey moment – creative camouflage for something else? – Rachel’s a good mate. He likes her the better now he no longer needs to court her. A deeper session of Googling has revealed that her connection with Princeton is through her family’s major benefactions. Good, for, unlike Tamsin, he isn’t a natural networker.

  Not the time of the White Male, especially an ‘old fogey’, as Annie once called him. He’ll wait for the wheel to turn.

  His grin widens at the thought of Tamsin: a gift from the women she’s labelled the ‘Three Witches’.

  31

  Fran’s in Norfolk preparing the cottage for sale, knowing it will take time to shift. She’s moving any cuteness from living spaces; the pink china pig and Johnnie’s blue owl go from the fireplace. Outside she’s cleaned the teak banana bench on which the hawk had shat, bought new bushes to look pretty by spring, rewilded a sunny verge with native seeds, rooting out modern hybrids that might repel the sophisticated second-home buyer.

  Every plant in the garden must be hardy or easily replaceable. All will be tidy. The wild strawberries are gone.

  Jane Austen is again muttering about fruit, set off by the mention of strawberries. Mrs Jennings stuffing on mulberries, Mrs Norris’s apricot no tastier than Dr Grant’s potato, General Tilney boasting of pineapples, Mrs Elton gorging on Donwell’s gourmet strawberries.

  Why this displacing of vulgarity onto fruit? smiles Fran. You never saw Bosch’s fleshly nudes devouring gargantuan strawberries.

  Shakespeare called them wholesome berries. I am always with the Bard.

  Did you know your ‘amiable’ Anne Boleyn had a strawberry birthmark proving her a witch and St Hildegard of Bingen rejected fruit that creeps with snakes and toads along the ground?

  Fran hums now as she pulls up nettles and dead plants, murmuring, ‘Sweet place, all nature has a feeling, landscape listens.’ Despite her poetizing their earthy pull, she knows the cottage and garden have demanded too much maintenance: her trees are overbearing, her flowers too needy. The trip to Venice had dark moments but on the whole, even with a tendency to overcloud in memory, it had been more than usually bright.

  She sees Jane Austen strolling by the bare apple tree quoting lines from Cowper’s ‘Sofa’:

  The sloping land recedes into the clouds;

  Displaying on its varied side the grace

  Of hedgerow beauties numberless.

  It’s winter, thinks Fran, but no matter. Words and things don’t necessarily coalesce.

  She ambles over to meet her Author. You haven’t always made my life better here, she says, with your caution, civility and repression, your maddening romantic endings.

  As ever, you misinterpret me, replies Jane Austen serenely. You were never a good close reader. Besides, we have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.

  Fran walks swiftly back into the warm house mumbling what not even she can hear.

  The mobile phone rings. She struggles to remember where she left it. Like her gardening jumpsuit, her long cardigans have capacious pockets so she can carry round useful items. But the phone almost always rings elsewhere. She locates it in the downstairs cloakroom next to a face-down open book. She presses the Talk button.

  Silence. Could it be another cold call about funeral plans or life insurance? She’s ready to press ‘End’ when she notices the number. Annie.

  ‘Horrible.’ The voice is raspy, distorted. For a split second, she thinks – absurdly – they don’t want her.

  ‘Tamsin is dead.’

  Fran slumps onto the lavatory top, steadying herself against the thin windowsill. What, how, when and – especially and for ever – why?

  ‘Knocked off her bike on the Newmarket Road. She had lights on. A car flung her onto a cement barrier. A hit and run. He didn’t even stop …’

  Fran thinks wildly of Shelley’s boat, perhaps run down in the mist by someone who sped from death. Literary thinking collapses. Why’s Annie talking about blame? She shouts at the phone, ‘It doesn’t matter about the driver.’

  The parents come to Cambridge, along with Tamsin’s young brother, a tall lad in his late teens. What had once been Tamsin lies in a funeral home near Mill Road; after private cremation her ashes will return with her family for burial in Leicester. To the surprise of her friends, the parents have allowed short visits to the Chapel of Rest.

  Fran is looking at Tamsin’s corpse – the way one stares at a road accident, a body pulled from the sea, nobody known. Has the face been adjusted? Surely being thrown into the air and against cement hard enough to kill would distort every feature into agony and shock.

  She tries to think appropriate memorial words: she shall not grow old, never old …r />
  The hair’s not right; its electric coils are damped down, almost straightened. To her horror, Fran feels a sudden squirm of desire. Necrophilia? Or is it only now she can gaze with impunity? Again, that unruly urge to giggle. It makes her shiver and sway.

  Annie takes her arm, ‘I think we should go. The parents don’t want us here.’

  They’re looking over with suspicion, even dislike. Fran hopes she can talk later to the mother and dispel a little of what she must feel.

  ‘See,’ says Rachel as they leave, ‘those young men are coming to get a last yearning look. For how many was she the love of his life, I wonder? There was a guy with the parents and brother, maybe the boy next door who’s waited ever since she quit Leicester.’

  A little ceremony is arranged at the College – a ‘life-celebration’. The parents are bewildered in the alien town; so, urged by the Tutor, Annie takes some charge. She suggests informality, people speaking ad lib.

  As Thomas begins, she sees her error.

  ‘The soul of man, like unextinguished fire,/Yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach,’ he’s saying. ‘Tamsin is a rare spirit, someone whom nothing should ever satisfy, too much for the world.’ He glances at a card in his hand and recites, ‘If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!/Follow where all is fled!’

  Fran whispers to Annie, ‘It’s about Shelley, someone should stop him. He’s near sobbing, don’t let him break down; the parents have their heads in their hands.’

  Before anyone can interrupt, Thomas ends.

  ‘Phew,’ exclaims Annie under her breath, ‘say something, Fran.’

  ‘I too would like to read a poem. Tamsin once quoted this to me from John Clare, whom she loved:

  The winter comes; I walk alone,

  I want no bird to sing;

  To those who keep their hearts their own

  The winter is the spring.

  No flowers to please – no bees to hum –

  The coming spring’s already come.’

  ‘Not sure that was much better,’ whispers Annie.

  ‘I really wanted to use those Byron verses she quoted to us – remember we were surprised? About darkness, “She was the Universe”.’ Fran chokes on her words.

  The boy from home gives a poised smile to the mother, who looks gratefully at him as he recites the appropriate poem: ‘Remember me when I am gone away.’

  Then Kwa reads something they assume is a lyric from a popular song and plays a recording of soupy music of the sort Tamsin might have liked at age ten. Fran jiggles her leg to the crude rhythm to show willing. She looks at Annie’s loud blackness. The feathered hat focuses attention on her. Was she once an emaciated goth in torn black down the King’s Road?

  It is, Annie had said, a hat for the occasion, understated and sombre.

  The College Tutor makes a dignified speech and Harmony sings an African folksong to a guitar. ‘She’d have to with that name,’ whispers Rachel.

  The mother, darker than Fran expected and with no hint of Tamsin’s beauty, begins to talk, then dry-eyed till now, cries to interrupt herself as her little white pot-bellied husband arms her away. Rachel too is crying. She cries easily, she’s said. It makes an impression on the parents.

  At the end they speak to the family.

  ‘She didn’t like our home,’ says the father, ‘not now. Even the garden was too tame.’ Suddenly he breaks into a gasping sob, his belly shuddering.

  ‘It was the Brussels sprouts,’ says Kwa – was he controlling a snigger, a wail? ‘She didn’t like the stalks you left in the garden.’ The mother pats his arm, then holds it tightly, pulling him to her.

  He springs free, ‘She didn’t like Brussels sprouts either. She left them on the side of her plate at Christmas.’

  ‘Hush. Don’t mind that.’

  Thomas has been crying but has the presence of mind to mutter to the parents, ‘My condolences …’

  ‘Tamsin will go on being our “influencer”,’ Rachel says.

  The word feels in quotation marks; Fran wishes Rachel hadn’t used it. Yet what to say? She’ll live in our hearts? Worse. So sorry for your loss?

  As you see, whispers Jane Austen, sometimes silence and deep feeling sit best together.

  Only sometimes, thinks Fran. Sometimes, only the ornate, the flamboyant, the baroque will do.

  ‘The canapés are good,’ says Annie.

  ‘I don’t think the parents wanted this. How did it happen?’

  ‘Harmony and Jason agreed.’

  Harmony and Jason whom we never met till now.

  Fran thinks, the mother must feel as we do, left out. She’s fussing about the car her husband parked in the wrong place, the College carpark being too difficult to manoeuvre into. She’s suspicious of these white women older than herself. What was Tamsin doing? What were they doing? She addresses Annie, whom she takes as the ringleader with that hat: ‘She moved away from us,’ she says simply, ‘when she came here. We hardly saw her. It upset Kwa.’

  ‘She really hadn’t,’ Annie responds quickly. ‘She was just in the long phase of “young adult”. She spoke warmly of her home and your big garden.’ Not strictly true but properly said. ‘She loved you all very much.’

  Wrong, thinks Fran, too possessing, too condescending. ‘We were just sort of aunties,’ she butts in. ‘So very sorry for your loss.’

  The mother clutches Fran’s hand, ‘She respected you.’

  Fran hears frost in the expression. She squeezes the hand. ‘She tolerated us,’ she says with what she hopes is a deprecating smile. She pulls Annie away, ‘We’re only bit-part players here, if that.’

  As they walk off, Annie chokes, ‘Why Tamsin? It should have been Thomas.’

  32

  You chose to live with women. Friend and sister were soul mates in that Chawton cottage you preferred to Manydown Park, your one real chance of marriage to a proper house.

  Jane Austen sniffs. I favour the term ‘companions’. Very dear companions.

  Yet you throw your girls to husbands as if you can’t stand them an instant more after they’ve caught their men. Nothing but flippancy to send them off.

  The rich afterlives rest with you, smiles Jane Austen. In Texas, California, the Arctic, Pakistan, my girls have fought vampires and werewolves, solved crimes …

  Just our bagatelle. You leave only one female grouping, one! If I wrote a sequel, I’d follow Maria Bertram and Aunt Norris. As I’ve said, you like to dwell on guilt and misery.

  Because Mrs Norris is thrifty, bustling with energy and anxious to fend off young rivals, you flatten her into a villain. But going into exile with a beloved niece shows heart. Why should these women torment each other? What’s so hard about exile with every comfort? They’ll have a nice house – Sir Thomas Bertram could do no less – they’ll be in another county, let’s hope a mellower one than stony Northampton (Sussex perhaps or soft Wiltshire), Maria is young, handsome and disgraced, just the type to attract a saucy charming man. Why on earth shouldn’t she have a second spring? And why shouldn’t Aunt Norris, loving Maria even more in her disgrace, turn a blind eye – or for that matter gleefully keep both open?

  Your whimsy.

  Really? There’s love on one side – common enough in ties across generations: Maria has security of affection. You think you can sniff out an adulteress, but that supposes a woman turns into a different creature after illicit sex. Beneath your cynical good humour, you’re waspish and intolerant: it’s we who’ve given you our liberal views.

  You are misguided on matters of importance, says Jane Austen stiffly. You’ve caught the arrogance of the Present, its moral bankruptcy. I might not come with you to – wherever you presume you’re going. (After all, she has millions to haunt – no reason to stick around with people who wilfully err.)

  We’ve created each other, whispers Fran, we must stay together.

  Not quite, snaps Jane Austen, her words and presence fading into the blankness which a perceptive succe
ssor compared to a spoon held up in the sun.

  Go on, grins Fran, you can’t resist house-hunting. Not Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet, but know-all Diana Parker bustling round Sanditon for lodgings, that’s you.

  I thought you’d never guess, chuckles Jane Austen returning to focus.

  Of course, you’ll come, exclaims Fran. Three women together – and no mother. You’ll share a room with Percy Bysshe, a big one, nothing improper, single beds. A Venetian window to look through, you gazing on earth, he at clouds. Mr P.B. Shelley and Miss Jane Austen will find each other unprepossessing but will chat amiably, both being bred as gentry, constrained by manners, the politesse of their rank.

  Or maybe you’ll stay in the garden: conservatives always lurk there.

  A year passes. The loss of Tamsin becomes a duller ache. Silently each thinks of that bewitching body avoiding the shrunken face, drawn lips, the bony frailty, sag and colourlessness of old age – only to be burnt to ashes. No wonder an occasional desire to giggle afflicts them.

  ‘She was never going to live with us, but she’d have stayed a while and added diversity,’ remarks Fran.

  ‘We have that,’ says Rachel, ‘mammoth differences between any two people. Diversity’s inbuilt.’

  Having swallowed the insult of a shared bedchamber, Jane Austen can’t resist quoting the Favourite Book: People themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.

  On the contrary, Fran thinks, people are remarkably repetitive.

  The visit from Tamsin’s parents doesn’t materialise, so plans to laugh warmly over smiley photos of their daughter as infant on the beach at Skegness or as teenager receiving school prizes are in abeyance.

  ‘I guess they didn’t like us,’ says Rachel.

  ‘Can’t blame them.’

  Nor has Thomas been calling on Annie in Cambridge as much as before.

  ‘We didn’t pay a lot of attention to his inner life. I assume he was describing that with his Shelley talk,’ Annie answers when Rachel quizzes her.

  ‘It wasn’t his inner life that attracted Tamsin,’ says Fran. ‘They probably hung out with us for each other. They liked our background noise.’