Hair Side, Flesh Side

by Helen Marshall

  She muted the volume. The real Gavin was lying next to her in the bed, had stayed over for the last few nights. Hanna was glad of it, had found that the standard assortment of complaints she typically brought to bear against her partners didn’t quite bother her so much. Perhaps it was the general loneliness. Perhaps it was because he was married, and didn’t seem as demanding as she would have imagined. Sometimes he seemed to forget about the sex altogether, caught up in a blur of telephone calls, the occasional phone interview or, as she was watching just then, major media appearances. What had been an energetic bit of fucking, punctuated by happy moments of productivity had soon blurred into less frequent heavy petting and a little more kindness. He read to her from the manuscript, practised his interviews with her, got her to ask him questions, and waited, patiently, for her evaluation of his performance.

  But not right then. Then he was nuzzling her shoulder, careful around the pins, didn’t want to hurt her, he said. By this point, Hanna didn’t know if it actually was hurting or dangerous. The doctor had never come, despite assurances from Gavin that he would pop round tomorrow or the next day. Not malice. It wasn’t even deception—not real deception— but she could see the question drifting out of his mind two seconds after she’d asked it, not sticking in there as a real concern at all. And so it had become less real to her as well. The manuscript was almost finished, and there would be time for doctors after that, and money too. Gavin had negotiated an advance of half a million pounds, almost unheard of, and his phone had rung off the hook for about a week—enquiries from Jane Austen’s estate, more pressing queries from the librarian at Cambridge demanding that he stop the press releases until the veracity of the document could be determined, requests from researchers, book dealers, rival agents, rival lawyers—until he got a second phone, giving the number only to his agent, his lawyer, Hanna, and his wife.

  “You’re beautiful, my darling, well and truly beautiful.”

  Hanna smiled, touched the silk-wire hairs on his chest. “And you are a man who gets paid to make things up for a living.”

  “Am I?” he asked plaintively. “I had forgotten. It seems as if I’m only parroting other people’s words, a publicist for the dead.” His eyes flicked to the screen.

  “I believe I’m the one who is supposed to be feeling sorry for myself. You should be cheering me.” She quirked an eyebrow, curious at the change of tone.

  “Right,” he said. “That’s why I began with the bit about you being beautiful. Which is true, by the way. Every word of it.”

  “I’m the editor,” she answered. “Not the wife. Don’t make me the wife.”

  “Ah, the crux of it all.”

  “Cruxes are for editors, I was taught.”

  “Crosses are for wives.” He paused. “To bear, that is. I am my wife’s cross, she says sometimes.”

  Hanna said nothing.

  “I think I might not go home tonight.”

  Nothing.

  “I think I might not go home ever again.” He whispered.

  Television-Gavin was saying something witty to the camera, and, muted, Hanna just caught the close-up on his face, smiling. She thought about that smile—the cat’s smile—slipping on and off again, the warmth of him beside her. Felt a little sad.

  “I think you should go home.”

  The next day, Hanna left the hotel room. The unctuous hotel manager, attentive to the last, stopped her at the door.

  “Mr. Hale said that you weren’t to leave.” His voice apologetic.

  “Mr. Hale is not my fucking keeper,” Hanna hissed. The manager took a step back, and she took the opportunity to walk out the front door.

  She took the bus from Victoria station to Oxford, this time without a book, without anything to do. After a while, Hanna took out her phone, began to check the missed messages—an overflow of worry, excitement, sometimes anger until the voices themselves became increasingly indistinct, just a mass of things wanted from her, things offered to her. She was fired, apparently. Her mother wanted her to come home. Something from Gavin at the end that she pointedly ignored.

  There was a weight lifting from her, as she stared out the window, watching the hills roll by, a patchwork quilt of dark green shrubs and lighter tones of grass, fields, the strange light of the shifting mass of clouds a clear sign that rain was coming. But it was England, and there was always rain coming, so she just watched the clouds, mottling from silver to black to white, shades and textures she never saw in the sky back in Toronto.

  Hanna made her way up Divinity Road, and turned off at Minster, the smell of roses and heavy humidity in the air. She barely recognized the house now, but when she unlocked the door to her room everything was where it had been before. She was worried that someone might have put her things out by the side of the road, even though she had paid up for four months in advance.

  Carefully, she climbed up onto the bed and unwedged her suitcase from its cramped space between the shelf and the ceiling. She had forgotten how small the room was, and it smelled musty now from the windows being closed in the summer. The bed was unmade, the towel she had used to wash her hair before she went to London hanging from the inside door knob. Dry now.

  She put the suitcase on the floor, and lay down on the bed.

  Someone was knocking on the door to the room. Hanna opened it cautiously, mostly expecting to see Gavin standing in the entranceway, but it was an oldish woman, formerly pretty, with smallish breasts and a rounding waistline.

  “The wife,” Hanna guessed aloud.

  “The editor.” The woman quirked her head, smiled, and she was prettier than Hanna had imagined at first. “May I come in, love?”

  Hanna gestured her in, but there was really nowhere for the two of them to sit, not with the suitcase taking up most of the available floor space. The woman did not try to sit, standing a little awkwardly. Hanna caught her looking around the room, her eye taking in the peeling ceiling, the narrow walls. “Sorry,” Hanna apologized. “I’ve apparently lost my job. But it didn’t pay very well to begin with— thus, the room.”

  “Gavin tells me that you stand to make a good deal of money soon, you and he. Are you going somewhere?” She nodded to the suitcase, and Hanna took the handle, tipping it up vertically so that there was a little extra space.

  “Home, I think.”

  “Not on my account, I hope?” The woman’s gaze was sharp, but then she smiled again and sat down heavily on the bed. Hanna sat down beside her, not quite as heavily, still unsure of the bearings of the conversation, unable to navigate it.

  “No—” she began. “It’s just been a long time. I miss it.”

  The woman nodded. “Well, you’re a pretty girl. I imagined you would be, common as any young lady in the kingdom with a tolerable complexion and a showy figure—” Quoting now from the book. “—very accomplished and very ignorant.”

  Hanna didn’t let herself show any sign of emotion at the jibe. “He showed it to you then? The pages?”

  “That’s not new, love. The original, the bit we already had.” Mrs. Hale turned away then, and began to dig through a large, overstuffed purse she had brought with her. Eventually she took out a manila envelope tied shut with string. She unwound the string carefully, not drawing out the suspense on purpose, but Hanna began to feel it anyway, something like dread. The envelope had an address on it, and a name, JAMES MARTEN, M. D.

  Finally, Mrs. Hale slipped out a series of photographs—x-rays, the shapes white and grey against a background of black, oddly reminding Hanna of the clouds earlier. But then as she looked further, she began to make out letters, little scrawls. Her eyes had gotten surprisingly good at reading this kind of text, fitting the superimposed images together, separating them into sensible bits and re-arranging them in order.

  It was a love letter. To Hanna Greeson, the most darling editor in all the world. She couldn’t make out all of it, but what she could read was most definitely Gavin’s—clean
writing, serviceable prose with just the right amount of pathos, the perfect, quirky endearments. But tiny, distorted, imprinted on the insides of his tissue.

  “He came home complaining of a pain, oh, months back now. Around the time he went to Oxford. And met you, I expect. Dr. Marten investigated. We were worried about colon cancer. His father went that way, younger than he should have. He was about Gav’s age. We were both very scared.

  “But then the results came back and it wasn’t cancer, and Gavin said he had found something, he had a major project due, something big. Yes, he showed me some of the pages. They were good. Very good. And it was all very exciting, a huge relief, something to take our minds off the things that had almost, but not quite happened. But he didn’t come home one night. I wasn’t surprised really. Sometimes he does that when he’s working. God knows, we have enough money and with the kids around it can be hard for him to get writing done, so when he’s in one of those moods and there’s a deadline coming, sometimes he’ll just rent a hotel in town and stay on until the work is done. Or so he’s always told me.

  “But then the doctor’s office called. I was half-sure that they had been wrong the first time, and it was cancer after all, but no, something else. They showed me the photographs. I didn’t know what it was.”

  She was silent for a long moment. Hanna looked again at the images, Gavin from the inside, made strangely unfamiliar when she saw all the curves and the angles backward. And the writing, of course.

  “He told me. He told me about the pages. About everything.” Mrs. Hale looked up and Hanna found herself returning the look, unwilling to speak. And then, unexpectedly, she rested her hand on Hanna’s.

  “It’s okay, love. Really it is. You weren’t the first, and I have no doubt there will be others. It’s just his way, and I’ve made my own peace with it. It’s what we do—wives, that is. It’s what marriage always meant to me, and it’s why I married him. Because he needs someone to care for him, for all that bundled enthusiasm and pride and ego and sometimes kindness. He’s not a bad man.

  “And the truth is—the real truth, between us women—is that I’d rather have Sanditon. Even if Gavin never wrote another word, the world would keep turning, there are plenty of Gavin Hales in the world and no one would really mourn.” Her smiled quirked up, reminding Hanna of Gavin’s smile, the way two people can come to look alike when they have shared a life together. “But then there’s you, my dear, and then there’s Jane. And maybe the world can’t live without her. Maybe that’s what it all means.”

  Carefully, Mrs. Hale reached for the photos, took them from Hanna’s numb fingers, slipped them back into the envelope and placed it on the bed beside them.

  “He might come for you.”

  “I’m going home. Tonight,” Hanna said.

  “He might come anyway. But I hope not. He’s a good husband, despite everything.”

  Mrs. Hale stood, took her oversized purse and left.

  Hanna was alone in the room. The envelope was beside her, but she found that she didn’t want to look at it again. She could hear the footsteps going down the stairs, listened as the front door quietly clicked shut.

  Then she unzipped the suitcase, and searched around inside for her own manuscript, the pages not entangled with Gavin’s after all. She counted out each one, finding herself reading bits and pieces as she went, automatically reassembling the words in her head, the shape of the unfinished story. Hanna found she liked it still.

  And then she slipped off her jacket, unbuttoned the blouse beneath and slipped that off too. The pins had kept the skin from tearing much further, but she could feel the perforation running down farther, almost to the swell of her breast now. She undid the pins one by one. She pulled back the flaps of skin. The ink smudged a bit, but she didn’t need to be so careful now that it was all fully photographed, the words recorded. She found that she could peel away most of her shoulder, that queer feeling of numbness and excitement all wrapped up together.

  And then she rolled up her manuscript, and she slid it through the gap, could feel the slight pressure of it against her ribs, on her pelvis. It felt right there. She reinserted the pins again, closing up the gap, thought better of it, and took out the tiny traveller’s sewing kit she kept in the top drawer. Bit by bit, she stitched together the edges until they just about fit, only a few times when she had to tug the skin close to match up ends that didn’t quite join up any longer. She could feel the weight of it, the way the pages settled against her inside, the words face-to-face with Jane’s, pressed together, ink rubbing on ink in the darkness inside her skin.

  [ skin ]

  A TEXTURE LIKE VELVET

  To Jeffrey M. Beeler, Professor, St. Hugh’s College, Oxford

  Delivered—after some delay—October 4, 1945

  To Jeffrey:—

  It is my most fervent hope that this letter reaches you, although it is impossible for me to know in what state I shall be upon your receipt of it, if any action on your part might prove beneficial, or indeed, wise. I do not know if the University is aware of all that has transpired. I do not know if this letter shall be burnt, or simply scoured for some sign of guilt, if it is read at all. Please read it, Jeffrey. I am afraid.

  They have given me this paper, this scrap upon which to write and although I do not know to what purpose it shall be put afterward, it is the only recourse left to me—me, whom you chided so pitilessly, whom you swore would never sit an exam while you lived and breathed, whom you so staunchly opposed, for whom every road was made steep, every word harsh, every test stringent and inflexible, the one you goaded, forced, exhorted so severely that no choice was left to me but to know the works of Aeschylus and Hesiod, Archilochus and Alcaeus and Sappho—all those great masters whose words have survived through the painstaking efforts of scribes and scholars such as yourself—as completely, as minutely, as you yourself did.

  This is a feeble Prologue, I fear, and if you have not scoffed at the notice of the sender, then I hope the carelessness of the prose has not turned you further against me. (Avoid cacophony and hiatus, you might have written, let your sentences be short and uncontaminated by such emotional discourse. We are rational animals, are we not? To the point, Miss Bahr, to the point!)

  And so—to the point!—I have been engaged for some time in a study of a certain manuscript come to light recently in the Bibliotheca Estense in Modena, a small volume written on a fine vellum, much damaged by fire but still clearly one of the earliest copies of a work thought to be attributed to Aristotle. My research indicated—and those colleagues of mine I call friends at the Royal Society have verified the results, checked transcription after transcription—that the book can be reliably placed near Heliopolis in origin, housed, I had hoped, in the lost Library of Alexandria.

  I can imagine your scepticism at such a claim: Overreaching, Miss Bahr—your constant criticism!—align the evidence first and let such conclusions as come naturally follow upon it. And perhaps such chastisement is deserved. Perhaps. Nevertheless, it was not the contents themselves nor, indeed, even the provenance of the book that was the thing. No, the parchment—the stretched and tattered skin, barely readable, discoloured by fire yet still beautifully resilient after all these years.

  In May, I departed for Cairo at the request of the Society. My passport was stamped, my visa checked in triplicate and the manuscript eyed hairily by authorities who neither understood its value nor my own purpose. “Where is the ustatha? The professor?” they would ask, your perfect echoes, deaf to any protestations that I was as skilled a researcher as any.

  Finally, a small, svelte man with immaculate English arrived to take me to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. Khaled Nassar, he said his name was, and he was a godsend, though he and I had much cause to dispute the term. Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him, says the Torah, but what do such words mean in a s
trange land, far from home? It has always been this way for my people. But I digress. . . .

  At the Museum my true work began. That intoxicating blend of excitement and curiosity you praised alone of my virtues, driving me forward even as exhaustion dragged my mind from those soaring pinnacles of knowledge, which we have glimpsed in the gelid mists of our studies. I was alone, utterly alone, but for my rescuer, my liaison with the Museum. He helped me negotiate the streets of that wretched city, sweat crawling down my spine, and taught me the few words of Arabic that helped me survive. In the evening, he would bring a strong, sweet coffee which we drank to the dregs together, discussing the struggles of research, the petty bureaucracies that exist in all Universities. Between us, there was that flash of friendship that comes when two minds strike against each other, flint on steel; and I remember the way his eyes might crinkle like foolscap when he laughed, the softness of his voice made thick by the strange accent I had only recently learned to negotiate. With the others I felt a stranger but with him, with Mister Nassar, that strangeness was not something to be feared but something to be celebrated—Therefore love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

  Mister Nassar brought to my research an exhaustive knowledge of the writings of antiquity, but more than that, he had a brother in Giza who working with a team of French scientists. He had agreed to sample the manuscript and perform the necessary tests to verify its authenticity.

  It took five days for the results to arrive from Giza, five days of the breath of Hades on my neck as I tried to fill my time reviewing my students’ Michaelmas papers in a hotel infected as by much by fleas as by the refugees pouring into the city daily, five days of cryptic responses from my liaison: “Soon, ustatha, it will be soon.” The paper, when it came, was heavily worn and bore many official stamps. I opened it carefully, reverently—indeed, it was that very document that has brought me to my current, wretched state. For I learned that my little codex had been housed in the Alexandrina Bybliothece, but that was it not all. . . .