Reader, I Married Him

by Tracy Chevalier

  With the hazily restored sight of my one eye I observe her nightly at her desk, where she sits writing furiously. She tells me she is writing an account of her life, and I have every confidence that she will turn our story as her will would have it—herself my saviour, her fierce morality triumphant, a truly righteous heroic love conquering all. Which is why I have seen fit to write down my own version of events in the hope that some future reader might ponder an alternative.

  I have as little expectation of this ever being published as I am certain my young wife’s account will be. Already she has written to publishers, under the name John Elton. As I have come to see from her history, the force of her conviction is of a metal that no man can easily withstand. For this account I hide behind no pseudonym. Nor do I imagine I have any prospect of being published. It is for poor Bertha’s sake, and in memory of little Clara, that I write this down, in order that there be somewhere some truthful record of what they came to mean to me. When I die, I shall entrust the account to my foster child, Adele, along with Clara’s coral, which I found so charred in the ashy remains of Thornfield that no one but myself will see what it had once been.

  DORSET GAP

  TRACY CHEVALIER

  THEY WOULD MAKE A very odd match, like daisies and gladioli, lace and leather. Ed knew that; he wasn’t stupid. Well, he was stupid in many ways, but not in that way.

  He wasn’t sure why he was with her today. The night before they had been to a rave in a field in Dorset, and the next morning both had ended up in a group of people who, despite hangovers and skin grainy with dried sweat from all-night dancing, had been intent on a walk to clear their heads. That plan lasted until they stopped at a pub in a tiny village and lost momentum in front of their pints. Jenn had gazed at them all, ranged around the table in various stages of stupor, then picked up the map and left. Ed watched her from the pub window, walking away along the empty country road, her wellington boots making her look like a farmer’s wife. Beguiled by the bit of calf between the bottom of her dress and the top of her wellies that flashed with each stride, he pulled on his jumper and went after her.

  He didn’t know her well. She was the housemate of a friend, studying Eng. Lit. to his Geography, so that academically their paths at university never crossed. He had seen her on the verges of parties, clutching a plastic cup of cheap warm wine that she probably took all evening to drink, sitting in a corner of the canteen with a book propped in front of her, crossing campus with a small smile, her eyes fixed on the middle distance. She was not friendless, not at all, but she was not a joiner either. Which was why Ed had been amazed to see her squashed into a corner of the car they were taking to the rave.

  Now, the morning after, he caught up with her on the road that headed into the depths of the countryside. Jenn barely glanced at him, simply nodded and kept up her even pace. Her round glasses and shapeless dress and frizzed hair signalled an indifference to her appearance that made her even more attractive. It annoyed Ed, this impulse to follow someone who didn’t care, but it didn’t stop him either, didn’t make him turn back to the simple civility of a pint and a packet of crisps.

  They walked up the little-used road out of the village and along a valley, hung on two sides with Dorset’s greenest hills, a canvas where black and white cows had been spattered to give it a convincing bucolic vibe. Ed couldn’t look at them too closely or his head pulsed from last night’s indulgences. “Where are we going?” he decided to ask. Everything with Jenn had to be decided, measured.

  Jenn gestured ahead with the map. It was incredible that she had a map out here. Last night she’d had a tent too, and a sleeping bag, and had probably got a good night’s sleep. Ed had seen her dancing early in the evening, eyes closed, contained, a fraction out of time with the thumping beat. Then she’d disappeared and he’d forgotten about her in the wash of E and drink. He himself hadn’t slept at all except in the car coming to the pub. He should be back in that heap of recovering ravers.

  They didn’t speak—it was easier not to—but walked in silence through the emerald landscape, the road unfurling before them, its steamy surface gleaming silver in the sun and hurting Ed’s eyes. No cars passed. Not even a tractor.

  Eventually they turned off the road onto a path that led from the valley up to a ridge. Ed had to pick his way around mud puddles that Jenn strode straight through, showing off with her confident wellies. His trainers were split and muddy and he already knew that later he would have to abandon them somewhere. He stopped to pee into a hedgerow, watering the flowers he knew none of the names of, though he expected Jenn would know and be pleased to be asked. He wouldn’t ask her. Why was he following her like this, helplessly full of something—a mix of desire and hope and self-disgust?

  Jenn did not wait for him, or slow down, and as the hill became steeper he fell further behind, panting, till she was out of sight. He had no cigarettes left or he would have stopped for one. His mouth was dry—E did that. Jenn would have water. Where was she?

  At last he reached the top of the climb, the hill levelling out and then tipping over into a wide bowl punched into the green earth. Jenn was standing at the edge, a field planted with something or other far below, peering back and forth between the map and the vista before her. She pointed at the far horizon. “Look, you can see all the way to Poole.”

  But Ed had already lain flat on the grass. She gazed at him, and for a moment seemed about to continue on her way. But then she sat down, ten feet away, and took out a book from her knapsack. Jenn would be the kind of person who always had a book on the go. Ed had loved books too, until suddenly he hadn’t, around age fourteen, when waves of temptation in the form of girls and drink and music and TV had crashed over and swept him away. While she read, he closed his eyes and let himself absorb the sun. He could hear sheep bleating in the distance, and birds somewhere, but little else. In the stillness his ears fizzed with last night’s music.

  Though he needed to, he couldn’t sleep, for she was there, with her book. Eventually he opened his eyes and propped himself up on his elbows. Across the bowl, black sheep were dotted on the far hillside like fleas. “Do you have any water?” he asked. Maybe asking would bring out the motherly side of her. Besides, he was thirsty as hell.

  Wordlessly she threw a bottle at him, then took up her book again.

  Ed drank three-quarters of the water before stopping himself, his mother’s admonishments memorable even years later (“Eddie, THINK about your brother, and me, and your dad, before you finish that bottle!”). He screwed on the cap and tossed the bottle back so that it hit her leg. Jenn ignored it.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Jane Eyre. Rereading it, actually.”

  Ed squinted at the cover. “Brontë,” he read. This rang a bell. He thought hard through his headache, his persistent, low-grade queasiness, his dehydration that the water hadn’t fixed. What he dredged up, in a high whiny voice, was this:

  Heathcliff,

  It’s me—Cathy,

  Come home.

  I’m so co-o-o-old!

  Let me in your windo-o-o-ow!

  He was proud of his rendition, and immediately went hard, remembering the hours he’d spent as a young teenager watching the video he had stumbled across, Kate Bush dancing in her red dress with her big bright mouth and her tiny tight hips and her caressing hands. Oh yes.

  “That is Wuthering Heights. Not Jane Eyre.” Jenn clipped her words hard. “Emily rather than Charlotte Brontë. There is a big difference. The biggest difference.”

  “Oh. You know, I always thought she was really singing ‘Waterproof Eyes’ rather than ‘Wuthering Heights.’ ”

  That did not help, Ed knew as the words hung between them, and he had that all-too-familiar sensation of wanting to claw them from the air and stuff them back in his mouth. He would have to appease Jenn somehow, or she would take off too fast across the fields and leave him stranded in Dorset—a prospect that terrified him. It was too green and quiet an
d pure out here.

  Already she was stuffing the book in her bag and picking up the map. “What’s Jane Eyre about, then?” he asked, lobbing the question in her way to slow her down.

  Jenn left a long pause so that he would know how deliberate her selection of words was. “A governess full of inner strength who marries a completely inappropriate man.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  They moved on, and Ed didn’t ask where they were going.

  Over a gate and into a wood, they walked down a path—“the Wessex Ridgeway,” she’d reported, because she knew that too—lined with nettles and thistles, which narrowed and enclosed it. Then, suddenly, it fanned out into a kind of clearing, where five paths led off, some into fields, others up or down hills. Next to one of the paths a wooden post had been driven into the ground, and a box the size of a bread bin attached to it at waist height.

  “Dorset Gap,” Jenn read from the map. “It’s a convergence of several ancient routes. Look, that’s a hollow way, where the path has sunk down over hundreds of years. People have been passing each other along these paths for centuries. It makes me feel so insignificant.” She smiled; it seemed insignificance was something she aspired to. She was more animated by this nondescript patch of grass than Ed had ever seen her.

  He looked around, and a memory came back to him that not even a hangover could bat away.

  “I’ve been here before!” he announced.

  Jenn stared at him.

  “When I was young, on a family holiday,” Ed added.

  Years ago, he and his younger brother had followed their parents along paths through fields and woods and farms, guided by their father wielding an Ordnance Survey map just as Jenn was. Ed had lagged behind, thwacking nettles with a stick and throwing clods of mud at cows, who responded with bovine indifference. It was rainy, and muddy, and he would rather have been back at the B & B watching TV. Even snooker—even cookery shows—would have been better than this walk. He was eleven, and bribes of chocolate and games of Animal-Vegetable-Mineral no longer worked on him the way they still did on his brother.

  They had arrived at this crossroads, and Ed’s parents had made for the box while he hung back, looking for something to hit with his stick. All he could find was his brother, who cried out and was ignored.

  His parents had opened the box, then opened a tin inside the box and taken out a black and red school notebook. Reading it, they discovered that passing walkers wrote in it, usually something about the weather and the surroundings, and signed and dated it.

  Dorset Gap glorious as always—perfect for a Boxing Day walk.

  The Cooper Family, Boxing Day 1988

  Had a lovely brisk walk here. Beautiful even in the rain. Picked wild garlic for salad tonight.

  Derek and Tessa, 3 April 1989

  Millie’s 6th birthday today—she walked all the way here in her new pink boots!

  Amanda, Rob, Millie + Tom, 10 August 1989

  There had been pages and pages of the stuff, and Ed couldn’t understand why his parents spent so much time reading back through it. Then they had insisted on signing it, writing something banal that Ed didn’t even bother to read. They had made him sign it too, and that had been the start of his teenage rebellion. He had written:

  Terminally bored—Dorset Cereal Killer in the making.

  They hadn’t noticed.

  He smiled now, remembering the misspelling, the being clever without knowing it. “You’ll like this,” he said to Jenn, going up to the box on the post. This was the first time she would actually respond positively to him on this walk, and Ed knew he’d better exploit it. He opened the box and the tin inside, and produced a notebook with a flourish. It was blue, but otherwise it might as well have been 1989 again. The comments were much the same:

  We have come here on a walk on our 17th anniversary. Shame about the rain!

  Bob and Betty, 25rd April 1998

  Could it be any lovelier here? Heavenly flowers.

  Chris with Trigger off the lead, 4 May 1998

  Mum and Dad made me sign this.

  Robbie, 15 June 1998

  The last made Ed smile. “Robbie” had been here today. Maybe he and Jenn would see him, trailing behind his parents, throwing sticks at sheep and beheading wildflowers.

  He handed the notebook to Jenn, who predictably sat down and read all the way through it as if it were an exam text. Ed didn’t tell her there were a couple of other notebooks in the tin, or she would have read those too. While she studied it he wandered about, taking a few steps down each path to see if something exciting lurked in a field or under a tree. Nothing did, as he knew nothing would.

  Jenn looked up. “You say this existed when you were young?”

  “Yep.” Ed came back and stretched out next to her, taking her words as an invitation.

  “How long ago was that?”

  He shrugged. “Ten years? Fifteen?”

  Jenn watched him. “Which was it—ten or fifteen?”

  He should’ve guessed she would want precision. “Nine years,” he chose randomly, though it happened to be right.

  “I’ll bet it’s been going on much longer than that.” Jenn was so absorbed in her thoughts she didn’t notice that Ed had begun to trace her calf with a finger. “I wonder where the other notebooks are. Maybe a local farmer keeps them.”

  “Doesn’t it just get thrown away when it’s full?”

  “I hope not! This is social history in the making, in its purest, most natural form.”

  Even when she was right, Jenn’s stances were fairly exhausting. Ed continued to run his finger up and down her calf, venturing past her knee.

  “Is there a pen in the tin? Never mind, I’ve got my own.”

  “You’re going to sign it?” Even as he said it, Ed knew the answer. He’d known the answer since seeing the post and the tin and the notebook. He’d known it since age eleven: people liked to sign that fucker.

  “Of course. It’s a responsibility for every passing walker to play an active part in history.” Jenn glanced at his finger on her thigh. Ed removed it.

  She rummaged about in her bag, pulling out the water bottle, a cardigan, the Jane Eyre, an apple. When she found her pen, she sat with the notebook on her knee, thinking. She thought for so long that Ed picked up the book and began flipping through it. Even Jane Eyre must be more interesting than lying here, waiting for Jenn to compose her magnum opus.

  It wasn’t. He turned towards the end, to see if the book got better. It didn’t. What a lot of words.

  “Your turn.” Jenn held out the notebook and pen. Ed felt like he’d time-travelled back nine years.

  She had written:

  I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.

  Jenn, 15 June 1998

  “Um, what is this?”

  “From Jane Eyre. I always sign things—guest books, visitors’ books—with a quote from whatever I’m reading at the time. To give a bit of myself.”

  Ed frowned. “But that’s not you—it’s Jane Eyre.”

  Jenn shrugged. “Books often say what I’m thinking better than I can. Now, are you going to sign it?”

  She continued to hold out the notebook, and Ed took it, suppressing a sigh. His mind was wiped completely clean of wit or profundities or anything that could possibly impress her. He couldn’t even think of a song to quote, not even “Waterproof Eyes.” For a second he was tempted to copy his eleven-year-old Cereal Killer quote, but even in his blankness he knew better than that.

  “Hurry up,” Jenn said, pushing her things back in her knapsack. “We should get back or the others might wake up at the pub and leave us stranded.”

  When in doubt, imitate, Ed thought. The sincerest form of flattery. He wrote. It didn’t take long. Then he signed and dated it and handed it to her, suddenly pleased, and a little nervous to see her response.

  She read what he’d written and began to laugh—much harder than Ed thought his words
warranted. He hadn’t quite meant them as a joke. She laughed so hard she squeezed her knapsack to her chest as if she were hugging a pillow, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. She was very beautiful when she laughed. It pained him.

  “Oh, Ed, you are funny,” she said at last.

  “What? What? I wrote a line I’d read! What’s funny about that?”

  Jenn smiled as she deposited the notebook in the tin and shut it. “Nothing’s wrong with it. Well, not nothing.” She put the tin in the box and closed it. “I think you should read Jane Eyre sometime, that’s all. Then you’ll know what the line really is.” She shouldered her bag and turned back up the path they’d come down.

  Ed watched her, thinking maybe he would not follow, but remain at Dorset Gap with its history being written down and kept in a tin box, or in a local farmer’s bottom drawer. His simple line, so simple even he could remember it—“Reader, she married me”—had joined all the other lines, banal and profound, at this crossroads.

  PARTY GIRL

  NADIFA MOHAMED

  IT WASN’T ALWAYS LIKE this, you know; for ages I was the kinda girl people said no one would wanna marry. Party Girl. Sharmuuto. Dhillo. I’ve heard it all. Started when I was around thirteen and got these breasts from nowhere, I’m talking flat as anything to E-cups in a coupla months; my hooyo made me put on a hijab quicksharp, no lie. Didn’t stop nothing, though. Boys and men still asking for my digits left, right and centre. Nothing to write home about, just leaaannn Somali boys acting gangster and Jamaican boys asking for a little touch. Hooyo said it was my face—that I’ve got the kinda eyes and lips that make men think they got a chance—she even started chatting about a niqab and I was like, hold on, bruv, there ain’t no way I’m covering my face. What am I? Some kind of Man in the Iron Mask? It wasn’t anything about my face, anyway, it was those E-cups and the way my badhi strained against the cheap, nylon school trousers.