In Love with George Eliot

by Kathy O'Shaughnessy

  ‘Indeed,’ echoed Marian. Why, she was paralysed — she could not think. Where would George have left the morphine?

  ‘Surely he would have left instructions with you or Amelia?’ asked Barbara.

  ‘Indeed, I would have thought,’ said Marian, and it seemed that Barbara flashed her another strange glance. The calm May day — what a mockery it suddenly all seemed: this peaceful garden, the still sun and shadow, the Ceanothus, blue berry-like flowers blooming steadily.

  Amelia was rushing towards them, no cap, saying she could search Mr Lewes’ office.

  ‘Excellent idea,’ said Barbra, instantly.

  ‘Yes,’ echoed Marian.

  While Amelia hurried off, Barbara knelt and stroked Thornie’s hand.

  What strength there was in her friend’s face, with that firm chin, that tender look she aimed at Thornie — why, this woman never tired of working for others. Whereas she, even while Thornie was in agony — a most peculiar, most regrettably selfish sadness was rising and enveloping Marian, even bringing tears to her eyes!

  ‘My dear Marian,’ said generous Barbara, reaching out her one free hand to her.

  Marian took Barbara’s hand, but despair was turning inside her now like a twisting knife. Her tears were not for Thornie, they were for herself, her own hopelessness, her unwritten book most of all, her detestable self-concern that consumed her. Amelia came; Barbara administered the morphia. ‘I know, I know, the pain will not go at once,’ said Barbara to Thornie, who was keeping his eyes fixed on her, ‘but very soon it will. Let us sing, Marian — what can we sing? Any distraction will be good.’

  ‘My voice is very poor. I am better at the piano.’

  ‘Come — sing with me,’ — and Barbara launched upon ‘Greensleeves’, and Marian joined in, somewhat quaveringly, and Thornie, quiet, white-faced, was distracted for some seconds, before he turned his face to the side, his lips pinching to stop crying out.

  ‘What is it? What has he got?’ There was horror on Barbara’s face.

  Marian told Barbara all she knew. Dr Paget was not sure; Thornie had contracted an infection in Africa, and he thought Thornie’s glands had hardened. It was likely he would recover. They had known about this at the end of last year, when Thornie had sent them a detailed letter.

  ‘You never mentioned it to me,’ said Barbara, turning to look at Marian with another strange glance. Marian muttered something. Why had she not mentioned it, she asked herself, after Barbara had gone. Perhaps because she hadn’t wanted to. She hadn’t wanted to. That was it.

  Next morning, Marian took pen to paper:

  Dearest B.,

  I feared, after you were gone, that I had seemed to urge your coming in a selfish sort of way, and before your note came I was going to write to you to say, that you must only think of us as not the less glad to have you because there was an invalid in the house.

  6

  It’s late February.

  Coming home, I find the building tools in the same place as the day before. There is a thin brown film of builder dust everywhere. Upstairs it’s the same: bathroom walls skeletal, just struts. The builder, a Romanian called Benny, hasn’t shown up for two weeks. He doesn’t take my calls.

  I have an idea, and when Sal comes round, I borrow her phone and call Benny. Sure enough, he picks up from a number he doesn’t recognise.

  ‘Kate! Hi!’ he says in a confidential voice, as if nothing strange has been happening.

  Benny wears trousers that have a nineteenth-century actorly look, they narrow round his calves like breeches. He has an attractive, troubled face, and quite long hair, and likes to talk at length about the tragedy of his country, where he was an engineer. Now he says I must not worry, he will be back in two days.

  Benny comes back.

  The curtains and matting are removed, the floorboards are bare, the naked sash windows with their architraves are painted white. The Victorian bones of the house are showing. I pick up a sofa on the street, which Benny and his friend take up for me.

  I’m still woken by the dogs each morning. Dale says the problem is the third dog. Before she came, they slept through the night. He has to look after the third dog for the next six months. I suspect he’s being well paid for it.

  ***

  I haven’t been to Ann and Hans’ place before. Inside the narrow hallway I can hear television, the bouncing, frenzied noise of a cartoon. The sitting room is two rooms knocked through. I’ve come to babysit, and I’ve brought Ann’s chapters to finish in my bag.

  Ann is kneeling beside her son, who is watching Tom and Jerry. ‘PJs,’ she is commanding. Her son, Ben, takes no notice. He sits erect, white towel at his waist, his bare back has an arch.

  ‘I love Tom and Jerry!’ I say. I want to smooth into these family surroundings. Ann snaps the television off, the arch in Ben’s back grows as he rears, throws his head back, yells.

  Footsteps, Hans enters. ‘What the — hi, hi, this is so kind of you —’ (to me).

  Hans switches the television back on, scoops Ben up and into his lap, in the same second. Watching the television again, Ben automatically sticks out first one arm then the other, as Hans puts on his top; just as absently, he sticks out his legs, which Ann feeds into the pyjama trousers. ‘He’s ready,’ says Hans, motioning his head upwards.

  On the television, Tom is chasing Jerry into a tiny hole; a white star explodes and fills the screen as Tom bangs into the wall.

  ‘He’s ready,’ repeats Hans.

  ‘Have you done the bottle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I asked you to do it.’

  There is an electric quality to Ann’s face: motionless, the eyes lit.

  ‘I’m happy to do it,’ says Hans, without expression.

  Hans gets up, he is a gawkily tall man. For once he is not in grey tracksuit trousers, he is in jeans. Leisurely, he goes out to the kitchen to make up the bottle. I wonder if his casual walk is for my benefit.

  ‘I can’t tell you how often I have to ask,’ says Ann, in an undertone, before going upstairs to settle the baby. I stay on the sofa. Hans joins me with the bottle in his hands. We make departmental talk, then talk about the Eliot conference in Venice. We’re both going, it turns out, and probably Ann too.

  What’s it going to be like teaching a class with this guy next term?

  Hans shifts in his seat, absently elbowing two plastic cars aside to make room for himself on the sofa. The room is full of plastic, the floor a sea of toys.

  ***

  After they leave, going to make tea, my foot budges a truck, a loud voice startles me, ‘Way to go, Bob!’ I pick the truck up and the voice stops. In the kitchen, I see framed black-and-white family photos above a shelf of books — and immediately I see three books on Eliot, familiar. Haight, Ashton, Hughes, three biographies. Rebecca Mead’s Road to Middlemarch. So Ann disperses her books, she doesn’t keep them all in one place. Or maybe she works in the kitchen? Above the table hangs a central lamp on a cord, low, spreading a pool of light. I look back at the books, and then at the bulging piles of paper in the shelf below, batches of A4 paper in elastic bands. I peek at the titles: Fearful Caution: George Eliot and the Woman Question — 1st draft. And another: Fearful Caution: George Eliot and the Woman Question — 6th draft. This is the book Ann is working on now. How many drafts is she doing?

  In the sitting room, I take her chapters from my bag — and can’t stop reading. After talking to Ann, I’d expected something antagonistic. But it’s not that way at all. Ann suggests that Eliot is like someone brought to a precipice, where the full landscape of women’s possibilities, their possible lives, stretches out before her — but Eliot’s adhesion to the real, to how life is being lived all around her, stops her from jumping.

  I think I understand what she’s saying. The next chapter’s more negative.

  ***

 
; There are sounds at the front door.

  ‘Hey! How’s it been?’ says Ann. She enters, cheeks red from the cold or alcohol or both. She is wearing a fur collar round her neck. They both look elated.

  ‘Has it been okay?’ asks Hans, also smiling.

  ‘Not a peep. Nice drink?’

  They say definitely.

  ‘I should be making a move —’

  They both protest loudly, and Hans reaches for the bottle of brandy. ‘Isn’t this Lewes’ tipple?’ he says, handing us glasses.

  We sit back.

  Hans says: ‘So you’re both writing books on Eliot, but you’re doing a fiction book, right?’

  ‘A novel,’ I reply. ‘A mix of fact and fiction.’

  ‘But what does that make it?’

  ‘All the letters and diary quotations are real.’

  ‘Ah so. All of them. Without exception?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You never said that to me,’ says Ann.

  ‘Hey!’ I say. I tell her how much I like her chapters.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘It’s so good!’ I say. ‘Especially all that stuff about Deronda.’

  Ann is smiling. ‘So — like what?’

  ‘Well … as you say … it’s much darker than Middlemarch. The marriage market’s kind of spooky — terrifying! But after that you’re pretty down on Eliot, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t like her,’ sighs Ann, blowing a strand of hair out of her eyes. ‘She saw it all so clearly, she still didn’t want change. All right for her. She was the giant exception.’

  I nod.

  ‘But you liked it’, she says, with a grin, after a moment.

  ‘Like I said’, I laugh. ‘I do.’

  ‘She won’t believe you,’ says Hans, with a smile.

  A crackle, a squawk, a cry — the baby alarm. Ann goes upstairs and returns with Michael on her shoulder, his face hidden in her neck. She gently disengages him, adjusting his position so that he is lying in the crook of her left arm. Discreetly she lifts her blouse, and then he is feeding. We are all quiet. Ann’s face has that empty look I have observed when she breastfeeds. Every now and then one of the baby’s feet lifts.

  I feel I must say something. ‘He looks happy.’

  ‘It’s downhill from here,’ jokes Hans.

  ‘He’s not a bad rabbit,’ says Ann, in her half-absent voice. ‘Hello — yes, I’m talking about you —’

  Michael has lifted his mouth off the breast, to look up at her. He is smiling. Ann has a small look on her face I have not seen before, a soft little encouraging look, her raised brows gently questioning. Abruptly I get to my feet, and go home, cutting their thanks short.

  Back in my flat, I sit without moving on my sofa. I sit there for some time. Then I go to my laptop, and scroll through the Eliot letters that I’ve scanned in. Am I looking for a particular letter? I’m not sure. I do stop at this one though.

  My dear Mrs Pattison,

  I feared after you had left us that I had allowed myself an effusiveness beyond what was warranted by the short time we had known each other. But in proportion as I profoundly rejoice that I never brought a child into the world, I am conscious of having an unused stock of motherly tenderness, which sometimes overflows, but not without discrimination.

  7

  Lewes was hardly working now. He had hoped to be working on his magnum opus, Problems of Life and Mind, but he was occupied with nursing Thornie, too distressed to concentrate. He worried for Marian too. She had not, he knew, started the next novel, Middlemarch. It was not even clear she was going ahead with it. Last week, she had mentioned Timoleon, the long poem she was considering writing about the ancient hero of Sicily. Each time she mentioned it, his spirits inexplicably lowered.

  But today at least was Sunday, they were having guests to lunch, and for the afternoon too. The prospect was cheering.

  He liked to supervise these gatherings. Sometimes they drank a light German white wine, a Spät-Burgunder; Lewes himself had a weakness for the deep malt whisky, served in small crystal glasses, the kind favoured by Polly’s Swiss friends, Monsieur and Madame d’Aubade: short glasses, sweetly curvaceous, engraved with a winding vine. At the same time — Amelia, to her credit, had become efficient at this — they served tea, in the two impressive Johnson silver teapots that Lewes had bought in Bermondsey.

  But he was tired. Looking in the mirror as he shaved this morning, he had been shocked by his face. Cratered with anxiety; forehead rutted with lines; his chin — he had to laugh — more vanishing than ever. However, stroking his moustache, he enjoyed the smooth feeling of it, and his beard; lucky moustache, lucky beard; lucky with women. Agnes a beauty; Polly a genius; not bad, not bad.

  He was tired because he’d been up and down the previous night four times to dose Thornie with morphine.

  After the second time of giving Thornie drops, Lewes had found himself too agitated to sleep. What would settle him? Pickwick — The Pickwick Papers. He had gone in search of Dickens’ novel, still the happiest book he’d ever read. But the book wasn’t in the drawing room, nor in his own office, so he took his candle into Polly’s study.

  In he had gone, the house suddenly seeming very silent.

  It must be said that he did not usually enter her study when she was not in it.

  He lit the gas lamp, which flared unsteadily, throwing an uneven balance of light and shadow across the room. Then, holding a candle close, he searched in the shelves. No — no — he went through the three long shelves, but it wasn’t there. What should he do? He couldn’t possibly sleep — his heart was going too fast. He did not want to think about the boy.

  Sitting at Polly’s desk, his eyes fell on her dark blue notebook. How well he knew that cover, gleaming low in the candlelight. It had accompanied them to Trollope’s villa in Florence, to Pompeii, to Assisi … He had often glanced over her shoulder as she briefly wrote in it during their travels, yet never looked inside. Curious. He drew it towards him now. He hesitated. Then, feeling like a trespasser, he opened it. Polly’s beloved handwriting: neat, consistent, something recognisably feminine about the graceful elegant control of that sloping hand, yet a determination, too, in its consistency, and what looked like, on first glance, the energetic compression of her entries.

  An owl hooted. Lewes began to read. Then he began to read more slowly.

  Why, how extensive were her researches.

  Possibly his senses were distended by the silence and stillness of the deep small hours of the night: only the distant ticking of the clock from the hallway downstairs, and sporadic faint scuffling, mice, behind the skirting board. And perhaps he was affected by the late, lonely hour; the high, desperate agitation of fear and love for Thornie, in which he was swinging on a daily basis; and the fluctuating light from the candle and the gas. The first thing that struck him was the confident moving from language to language. A multitude of languages: jottings in Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish — even, if he wasn’t mistaken, some lines in Sanskrit. (What was that scent — verbena? And, perhaps, orris root? Could they be growing outside the window? The night breeze was bringing with it a soft but wild, exotic fragrance.) But it was her scope, the wideness of her searching eye, roving from ancient to modern, from historian to historian, that struck him with a flame-like clarity, then; that to understand history was her driving object — to understand, even, what might constitute history or progress. He read on: what was she chasing, with her reading? Was she meditating the idea that each perspective called history was in time superseded by another? Was no perspective, in short, the essential perspective? The drive, the eye, her remarkable eye, had a probing intention that was nothing short of majestic. In woman or man.

  He continued turning the pages. But slowly he was aware of another realisation. She, novelist that she was, must incarnate her insights into
human drama. No wonder she was dazzled by this challenge!

  Or paralysed.

  The owl hooted again. Lewes’ feet were cold, in his thin socks. It was late; he was a taut combination of exhaustion and energy, his pulse still running hard.

  He was scanning, reading, turning the pages. And then Lewes sat back. He had slid from apprehending the beauty of her aim — to something like horror.

  This ambitiousness, this magnificent ambitiousness! It had occurred to him, in this candlelit room, that Polly was in the grip of such ambitiousness, she could not make her fictions carry the weight of them. Oh she could, of course she could, and had done so, she had managed to make Romola live — just — just. But with what difficulty. He thought of Mantegna’s Cult of Cybele in Rome, where the grey figures were like statues, imperceptibly endowed with life, on the cusp. She had tried, like Mantegna, like the mythical Pygmalion, to bring her statue-like figures from an alien age to life. Her ambitiousness! This was why she had set Romola in that jewel-encrusted past of the highest painterly art, the time of Savonarola — the very setting had pomp, and, by being so distant, demanded an excruciating amount of historical research.

  But who had set her off on this road? Who had fired her imagination and purpose? As the owl hooted again, Lewes had a second lurching moment. It was himself. The memory made his hands clammy. In Florence, reading about Savonarola in his guidebook, he, Lewes, had been struck by the idea that this period had excellent possibilities for a historical romance. He’d said so, and Polly had been receptive — instantly. Hadn’t they gone the next day to San Marco? Where Polly had gazed and gazed at the Fra Angelico Crucifixion, her blue eyes narrowing with new interest; a new solemnity in her attention. A high solemnity. He, of course, had aided and abetted her, going alone to the monastery of San Marco (ladies not admitted) to take notes for her.

  Lewes let his head fall at the memory. Why had he fired her up in this way? No — he remembered perfectly well why: the very removal to another time in history had seemed a balm — a potential release; hadn’t she just suffered when writing about Maggie and Tom in The Mill, thinking so much about Isaac? Wasn’t she suffering from the way they were living, unmarried — gossiped about, and the brutal rejection by Isaac and her family? More than anyone else, he knew what it had cost her to write The Mill, to re-enter that past with Isaac. Why, he had thought — he had thought — a historical romance was — a historical romance.