In Love with George Eliot

by Kathy O'Shaughnessy

  ‘It’s almost caricature,’ said Marian. ‘The satirical parts, I mean.’

  ‘But she keeps just this side of realism,’ said George quickly.

  George was the most percipient critic, thought Marian. How lucky she was to have him at her side. Here, she had everything she needed. Their landlords were a good couple, decent, honest, kind (she’d long ago forgotten all her suspicions of Mrs Aymes). As for the white kid-goat, he was comic and endearing, with his human-sounding bleat, his responsiveness to a pat on the head, his warm nose and soft lips — she had taken to feeding him bits of apple in the afternoon. In the last week, she had risen at six-thirty with the brilliant morning light — on clear days she could see France from the window — and worked without strain through till two o’clock.

  The night before, he’d read it, and said she’d managed a ‘tricky’ subject ‘superbly’. And it was a tricky subject, she thought, the eponymous Janet being married to a wife-beating alcoholic, called Dempster.

  It was good in Jersey. She could enjoy the air, no curious critical eyes were watching. But one day, returning to the sitting-room, still feeling the exhilarating wind and sun on her cheeks from outside, her eyes adjusting to the relative darkness of the parlour, she saw a letter on the table. It was addressed to her, but the handwriting made her stop — and then walk to it more quickly to pick it up. Not family, but familiar. In the light of the window, she saw the script more clearly. Black ink, meticulously small. Opening it, the name at the bottom made her heart beat faster. Vincent Holbeche, Esquire. Her family’s solicitor in Warwickshire.

  Dear Mrs Lewes,

  I have had an interview with your Brother in consequence of your letter to him announcing your marriage. He is so much hurt at your not having previously made some communication to him as to your intention and prospects that he cannot make up his mind to write, feeling that he could not do so in a Brotherly Spirit. Your Brother and Sister are naturally anxious to obtain some information regarding your altered state. Permit me to ask when and where you were married and what is the occupation of Mr Lewes.

  She sat down on the sofa. George came in; he was telling her about creatures, holding up the jar for her to look at. ‘You’re not listening,’ she heard him say. Then he was taking the letter from her hand. Lewes burst into a diatribe about narrowness and ignorance. Marian tried to ignore what he was saying, to concentrate instead on what she knew: Isaac teaching her to ride, or blowing warm air on her hands to warm them, that freezing day by the pond. And then there was Chrissey — she had faith in Chrissey.

  She wrote back to Mr Holbeche, saying that Lewes was a well-known writer, and they both regarded their marriage as a sacred bond, even though it wasn’t legal.

  Letters arrived from her siblings — Isaac, Fanny, and her favourite, Chrissey. They all broke off contact with her. At supper, the second night, she was quiet. Later, reading Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Marian put the book suddenly down, excused herself, and went early to bed.

  ***

  The days were spent quietly. Each time she thought of her family, she knew a cold and queasy sensation, a light trembling in her stomach; she shifted her thoughts back to work. She was glad when a letter arrived from the Scottish publisher John Blackwood, about ‘Janet’s Repentance’:

  It is exceedingly clever and some of the hits and descriptions of character are first rate, but I should have liked a pleasanter picture. Surely the colours are rather harsh for a sketch of English County Town life only 25 years ago.

  ‘Harsh indeed,’ said Marian, her lip curling.

  The first scene especially I think you should shorten. It is rather a staggerer in an opening scene of a Story of Clerical Life. Dempster is rather too barefaced a brute and I am sorry that the poor wife’s sufferings should have driven her to so unsentimental a resource as beer. I feel certain that I am right in advising you to SOFTEN your picture as much as you can.

  ‘Soften it!’ she said, derisively, before passing the letter to Lewes.

  ‘He’s thinking of the god-fearing public,’ said Lewes, jokily. He did like to keep her spirits up. Also, Blackwood was his publisher too, he didn’t want him too lambasted by Polly.

  ‘I have no illusions at all about the public,’ said Marian. The cold sharpness of her tone made Lewes look up.

  Without looking at George, she sat down to write her reply.

  Everything, she said in the letter, that she had written in ‘Janet’s Repentance’ was already softened from the fact, so far as it was permitted to soften and yet remain essentially true. The real town was more vicious than Milby; the real Dempster was far more disgusting than hers; the real Janet, alas!, had a far sadder end than hers.

  Let him know the truth.

  ‘Polly! You’ve gone through the paper!’ cried Lewes.

  It was true: she had pressed so hard with the nib, it had broken through.

  In the early evening she went for a walk down to the beach. It had been a breezy, sunny day, but now the wind had died down and the sea was peaceful, glassy, the light was golden. There were scarcely waves. The surf came in with a quiet shushing noise. She sat in the usual place and waited for her own feelings to quieten.

  What would it be like, no contact with her family?

  How fitting, being on an island.

  As if reflecting her thought, the bowl of the horizon so perfectly still, the deep ultramarine of the sea below the golden colourless sky, paling and paling; the line between sea and sky dark, dividing the two.

  4

  Monday afternoon, I’m locked out of my new flat. I sit on the steps, think what to do. I have no idea where a second set of keys is. I check pockets and bag a last time.

  I can ring the bell of the downstairs flat; but the man who lives there, Dale, carried my flatpack up the day before. I ring the bell all the same. Dale answers. ‘Ah, Kate,’ he says. ‘What can I do for you?’ Dale has reddish hair, is Northern Irish, is an actor and a dog-walker. He doesn’t have keys for the top flat.

  An emergency locksmith fits a new lock at chronic expense. The flat is more or less empty except for five packing cases.

  It’s January, cold and soon it will be dark. But the light comes a little later, I notice. I’m in my own place at last.

  ***

  ‘You don’t think you’ve come too soon?’ says my sister.

  I’ve been living for a year in Tooting with Sal and her family, while lawyers sort the money out. Furniture is in storage until building and painting are done. She suggests doing a packing case a day. As she is leaving, she says slowly, ‘You know, I saw Rob. I saw them both, actually.’

  She pauses, then adds, with a strange anxious look, ‘She’s not that bad.’

  ‘Right. Okay. Well —’ I go to open the door for her. We stand there without speaking.

  ‘Well, bye!’ I say. She gives me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Speak tomorrow,’ I add, as I shut the door.

  A minute later there’s a knock.

  ‘Look —’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say hurriedly. ‘I’m serious. Now —’

  Sal’s expression makes me stop talking. Now we’re both silent. Then she says, steadily, ‘I — don’t — like them, you know. I really don’t. I don’t know what I was talking about. Do you believe me?’

  She’s laughing a bit. We hug.

  ***

  It’s night. The flat is solitary but I walk around; I’m restless and half excited being in my own place in London. I open the window to the unfamiliar street sounds. There’s a pub at the end of the road. Mainly there’s silence.

  I am woken before dawn by the dogs barking below.

  ***

  I’m getting used to the journey from Finsbury Park to Bloomsbury, where QEC is. I like Bloomsbury, with its trees and soiled air and dilapidated buildings. Pleasant and shambling, it feels like a part of London that’s been left to itse
lf, developers haven’t quite got there. But just now there are ructions.

  Hans Meyerschwitz, our new departmental star, whose specialty is ‘Personal Writing in the 19th Century’, is throwing his weight around. He has vetoed a man called Jo Devlin from speaking at the Eliot conference — Jo Devlin works in the same field at Queen Mary’s College. There’s a known history between Hans and Jo Devlin: they both competed for the job that Devlin has now, a year before.

  I go to see the chair of our department, Marcus, who inhabits a large office with recessed lights. He is usually very busy, but when I come in he’s lolling in his chair. ‘Hey, Kate, sit down.’

  I explain that I’m scheduled to teach a class with Hans next term, on personal writing, and I’d rather not. Marcus asks why.

  ‘His veto of Jo Devlin,’ I say.

  Before Marcus can object, I add: ‘No one can do that! Did he bring it up with you?’

  Marcus says it’s timetabled now, he doesn’t want to mess Hans around. ‘It’s just a weekly class.’

  ***

  Not long after that, in Finsbury Park, in the corner shop near my flat, I recognise Hans Meyerschwitz at the end of the aisle. He’s buying milk. He is easy to recognise because of his height: tall, with straw-coloured hair, Aryan colouring. I look at him again — I like the scarf he’s wearing, hard to say why. He’s talking in an easy way to the Iranian man at the counter.

  ‘Hans?’

  He says hello; then — ‘What are you doing here?’ — smiling.

  ‘I live here. Just moved in. In Osborne Road.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since — a week ago.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  I say there’s building to do and painting.

  ‘Ah so.’ Hans is German, and his voice is slightly accented. He goes on to say, in a voice of perfect indifference, that he is looking forward to teaching our class next term. We are doing a class on Victorian letters and diaries, starting in April.

  That night, I’m woken by the dogs downstairs, the yelping coming through the darkness. I check my phone: 5.02.

  1859

  5

  On a cold, clear afternoon, Marian and Lewes did the long walk from Richmond to Wandsworth, to see the new house again. On the way back they fell into a happy silence, the darkening afternoon sky flushed with faint pink as they passed through Richmond Park. Lewes had just published his Physiology of Common Life; Marian had high hopes for Adam Bede. It was her first novel.

  They were still quiet when they reached home. The prospect of the move was elating: Holly Lodge, the new house, was sturdy and solid, with larger rooms, and they would now have a study each. Yet the unfamiliarity of those strange streets in Wandsworth made them thoughtful. They would no longer see the brown-green river Thames with the boats going slowly along, or Richmond Green, or the handsome white-painted houses of Maids of Honour Row. They didn’t know anyone in Wandsworth. Barbara had recently got married, and gone to live in Algiers with her French doctor husband.

  The new house was unfurnished. On a foggy, freezing January afternoon they went in to London to buy rugs, glass, a dining table and chairs; a bed and linen; a set of blue and white china, a silver tea caddy. Back home in Richmond, they were exhausted. ‘Way of the world, Polly,’ said Lewes with a rueful laugh, patting her on the knee. She was silent. They’d run into a couple Lewes knew, on St Andrew’s Hill, and the woman had cut her — literally looked through her as if she were a ghost. She could still see the superior, cold rictus on that woman’s face.

  That night she dreamed she was back in Griff House, her childhood home in Warwickshire. She was outside. She could hear the gentle roaring noise made by the leaves of the beech tree, wildly rustling, but she couldn’t work out if the sound were loud or soft. Then she was standing on the threshold, then going inside; she knew exactly where she was going, to the bedroom on the second floor that was Isaac’s. As she was mounting the stairs, she had a gathering fear that he would have gone, until she was running, pushing the door open, only to find the room empty, silent. She went into room after room, looking for Isaac, but also Chrissey and Fanny. At this point, she woke up.

  She had had no contact with her family for two years.

  She was a pariah, she said to herself drily. After Christmas, Lewes had gone to Vernon Hill to see his old friend Arthur Helps, while she stayed at home.

  She’d watched him from the doorway as he walked down the road — his quick step, the way his small suitcase swung jauntily as he walked. She spent four days alone, correcting the first proofs of Adam Bede, reading Horace. On the fourth morning, perhaps because she had talked to no one for so many hours, the silence became a noise, a high sustained splitting sound in her ear. She walked around the sitting room, regarded herself in the mirror. ‘I am ugly, and I am mad,’ she said aloud. Then she put her coat on, walked to Richmond Park. Alone on the bench, she cried.

  On return Lewes was in good spirits. His voice was deep and nasal because he had a cold, but he was full of stories about the charades they had played.

  She listened to him in silence. He had been carousing, she was in hiding.

  But hadn’t she always liked hiding places? As a child, in Griff House, she liked to hide upstairs in the first-floor corridor, at the top of the linen cupboard. It smelled of lavender mixed with soap, and the dense, sharper smell of raw cut wood — her father had built the cupboard himself. It was like a hiding place, living here in Richmond with Lewes. He could freely visit, but she could not.

  Adam Bede was shortly to be published. And she would still be hiding in the most important way of all, behind the name of George Eliot.

  6

  Marian surveyed the parlour of Holly Lodge. That morning they’d tried the new sofa in the bay window and against the wall, but nothing quite worked. Aloud, she said it was a square, charmless sort of room.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ admitted Lewes. ‘But we’ve got some fine almond cakes.’

  ‘Is that the shirt you’ll be wearing, George?’ asked Marian, lightly.

  ‘Is anything wrong with it?’

  ‘No — no.’

  Marian had asked Caroline to make sure the fire was properly lit, to wear a clean apron. On the dot of four the guests arrived. Marian shot Maria Congreve a swift glance under her lids: yes, she remembered her from years ago, when they were both living in Coventry. Maria was a girl then, very slender; now she was a married woman. As for Richard Congreve, she instantly registered the dark-brown tweed jacket that suggested the university man, and his upright bearing. He’d taught at Oxford, Marian remembered. Lewes, of course, was not a university man. While Mr Congreve sat stiffly, Lewes, by contrast, rather short, his wide sunken cheeks narrowing to a chin of unusually small width, was moving around the room quickly, clapping his hands, saying he was delighted they’d come, he’d see about the tea. Glancing sideways at the guests, Marian wished he’d moderate his enthusiasm a little. And Lewes’ shirt — had he chosen it on purpose? The collar, in its blowsy, scalloped way, resembled — ruffles — like something an actor in an Elizabethan play might wear. She was forgetting. He had at one time been an actor.

  ‘I hear you’re a follower of Comte,’ said Lewes then. He addressed his remark bluntly to Richard Congreve. It sounded like a challenge.

  ‘A follower,’ echoed Richard Congreve.

  ‘My dear,’ murmured Marian. ‘I’m sure Mr Congreve is the first and finest exponent of that illustrious movement.’

  Mr Congreve inclined his head graciously.

  ‘Of course he is,’ said Lewes.

  Caroline brought in the tray, but it was Lewes, making a great show of it, who poured the tea, holding the pot high, like an affected waiter.

  Mr Congreve’s eyebrows rose.

  Quickly, Marian looked away at Maria Congreve, who had her hands clasped in front of her, and seemed
to be regarding the floor. The kind gentle expression of those dark eyes. Also, Maria was glancing at her, with evident interest.

  Lewes was handing Maria a cup, and doing an absurd little bow, like a lackey. She looked back at Maria. Was he deliberately riling her? Or mocking Richard Congreve? And Marian couldn’t stop glancing at Mr Congreve’s face, the play of irony on his dreadfully fine features — straight nose, fine sculpted mouth, too perfect, like a Greek statue. She managed a forced smile in his direction.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Maria.

  ‘And you, m’sieur?’ quipped Lewes, to Richard Congreve.

  Yes, Lewes was pushing it.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mr Congreve briefly, clearing his throat. Then his face seemed to unbend. ‘I have an idea that, regarding Auguste Comte, you’re no longer the admirer that you were. But I remember, Mr Lewes, that you once wrote admirably on Positivism for the Leader — the same piece was in your book, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences. I read it a few years ago. I liked it.’

  Lewes thanked him. The atmosphere seemed to soften.

  In the next moment Maria spoke for the first time, in a voice that was only just audible. ‘Is that Icarus?’ she said. She was glancing at the silver tea caddy, the one they had bought in the Strand. On the side of the caddy was a raised figure of a boy with wings, so delicately done that tiny drips of wax were visible, intricately figured at the base of the wings. The boy was flying into the arms of a hot sun, a ball of fire, with rays emanating from the ball, in the shape of little pear-shaped tears.

  ‘It is,’ said Marian smiling. ‘How observant of you.’

  Did Mrs Congreve remember her?

  Richard Congreve cleared his throat, before saying, ‘I rather agreed with Pater, who prefers Dryden’s translation of Metamorphoses above Pope’s.’

  Then, softly, and with an unexpectedly playful smile, he began to declaim: