by Jane Gardam
He invited me to his flat at Brook Street—a party that same evening—where Fellows of All Souls put their fingertips together and stared into space, and several lady novelists looked out of windows.
He was as ebullient as ever—the perfect host, eyes everywhere. Food, drink, waiters all superb. His clothes—never a whiter shirt, a suit more English—must have cost a bomb and had pretty clearly not been paid for out of his grants and scholarships and awards, though even when I first knew him his powers of negotiating an award would have been of use to any multi-national oil company. All—I heard from one of the lady novelists—had been provided by a series of wives.
Now at first looking at Shorty one was a bit uncertain about wives. It was not that he looked homosexual—he had a big brown juicy glare for any woman who came his way—but he had the homosexual’s awareness of himself and his image that does not go with conventional sexual diversion. His big, slow, lumbering frame making its way across the Ritz or Claridges—I was invited to meet him there now and then after he had begun to hear of my books—spoke of a spiffing physical and mental health, a supreme self-confidence, but not what my cousin Enid calls, ‘the life upstairs.’ For to Shorty—so they said in Private Eye and I am sure to his delight, ‘Excitement means the pen.’
There must have been a certain type of woman who responded to him, however, because several of them married him. I met one in Brook Street, then there was a second—I saw her pictures in the evening papers sometimes—and then there was Lois. All three were much the same—tall, dreamy, bony, American good-looking with a tiny bewildered voice and a gigantic bank balance. Women who had the air of people needing a good rest. How he got hold of them nobody knows but it was surmised by the same private and industrious bludgeoning he accorded the short story or the sonnet. A short story or a sonnet bludgeoned by Shorty looked as if it needed a good rest, too, and usually got one.
One Thursday, two days before our outing to Chawton down the Portsmouth Road and three days before my mission with the thousand pound cheque, I had met Shorty again after another long interval. It was a summer afternoon meeting of the Royal Society of Literature in Hyde Park Gate with all the trees blowing leaves along the Bayswater Road and the clink of teacups on the terrace. There he stood—not aged a bit—a great block of a man still, perhaps slightly heavier, perhaps a shade more authoritative if that were possible. He towered above Lord Butler. Lord Snow became a flake. His bold brown eyes stuck out, the brains almost bursting from the bull’s forehead. When he spoke it was still with the surprising coarse, slow snarl so different from the rest of him that it seemed an affectation.
Near him, looking out over the balustrade, hung Lois, more raddled than I remembered but bird-boned, huge-eyed, expensive still. Her fingers were knobbed with rings, her old frail feet were in crocodileskin, like prickly silk. As I saw her she turned and began to walk towards the lecture room where people were beginning to settle on the canvas chairs. I followed and said, ‘Lois.’
She said, ‘Well, hi,’ and slid to the floor in the path of the Duchess of Kent. (For it was a big occasion and prizes were being handed out.)
‘I’m pissed,’ said Lois loud and clear as the Duchess stepped over her, and Shorty and I got her back to Claridges where we called a doctor, had a bit of a battle with the gin bottle and eventually put her to bed.
Shorty managed splendidly. Not even whilst holding his poor wife’s head in Hyde Park Gate—I at the other end with the crocodile shoes—did he lose his dignity, and afterwards he rang me up and in the same grating, metallic voice as of old asked me if I would go out with them on Saturday. Yep—she was quite better. Yep—it happened often. It was an illness, poor Lois. He preferred to treat it as an illness. Now then. Lois had especially asked for me to go. Also, I would be useful, Lois not being able to be left at home. We would be going with a very famous man—a literary journalist often to be seen on the box. Yep—that’s the man. And lookit—I knew the guy he was sure. He suspected that I knew all the big names now lookit (and here I did just wonder if I felt the slightest pause), we would be going to Chawton, near Winchester. To photograph some handwriting. Ya. Yep. Thassit. Jane Austen’s cottage. And we’d have lunch somewhere.
I had not the least wish in the world to go. I felt that in some mysterious way Shorty Shenfold was haunting me. Why, of all the people I had met in my life, was it Shenfold who kept turning up? And what had happened to all the dear old friends, the ones who in novels are suddenly there in the street beside you, dancing to the music of time? Why for me was there only unspeakable Shenfold? And why could I never say no?
The photographic session was to be at the Chawton cottage on the Saturday morning before it was open to the public—a pre-arranged and rather stately affair. A senior member of the Jane Austen Society was in attendance. We were warmly welcomed and Lois and I allowed to watch the whole ceremony. I was allowed to hold the MSS, touch the old writing paper, smell it, look close at the lovely, diamond-sharp, unmistakable hand.
Lois was soon bored and wandered away into the living room, and I heard the clatter of an Austen-type vegetable dish displayed on the Austen-type dining table and thought I’d better go after her.
She stood by the writing desk in the window drawing an old woman’s finger over the old blotched wood. Only the hands showed her to be twenty years older than Shorty—her figure was ageless, American East Coast, face fragile, cherished, painted; she looked out at the Chawton pub across the village street and blinked her wet blue eyes. She said, ‘So she jus’ sat here, did she? Writin’ away?’
I said that this was what was said.
‘So she looked right in at the pub, did she?’
I said that I supposed so. It was an old pub. The cottage itself had once been a pub, but the pub across the road was quite old too. She might have sat at an angle, I said, facing the pond that used to be over towards what was the car park now—on the right.
‘The pond or the pub,’ said Lois. ‘Like me, it’s the pond or the pub.’
‘Not with Jane Austen,’ I said. ‘She never despaired.’
‘Don’t they say she sat in a hood? Right over her face? Near the end? When her face—her terrible discoloured face . . .?’
I said that I had read about that somewhere. It had been a caul not a hood.
‘The pond or the pub in a caul. Jesus,’ said Lois. ‘Poor bitch. Y’know, Annie, I wonder what she really felt?’
She took a scent bottle out of her bag and swigged at it.
‘She never met anyone like me, did she? Don’t seem to me she knew a lot. I bet she’d never even looked inside that pub.’
She began to cry.
‘Someone ought a write a book about me,’ she said, ‘not about this bitch. About me. Dare say they will. Some hard-mouthed boring bitch. Some frienda Shorty. Shorty likes a hard-mouthed bitch. Write her up. Lot this bitch knew—’
Shorty and the literary editor were coming towards the living room. Before they had seen us I heard the literary editor say in the little connecting lobby, ‘My dear—this is going to be utterly exciting.’
Then we got Lois back into the Mercedes and to London. She was not well enough for luncheon in Hampshire and nobody seemed to mind except me—I was hungry. Shorty and the literary young man had much to say to each other in the front of the car and I spent the mercifully fast journey in the back trying to command the scent bottle. It was a long afternoon. The following morning Shorty rang to say Lois was dead.
I had been afraid that when I got to Claridges I would not be able to stand him—or anything. I expected possessions in heaps, splayed suitcases (she had been hideously untidy), even twisted sheets—the Manager with hooded eyes, Shorty calm as ever but ashen, and a smell—her scent, her gin, her cigarettes, her hectic presence still about.
It was almost as unnerving to meet with no shadow or breath of a memory of her. Through the door of
the suite leading to the bedroom I saw twin beds at a distance from each other under splendid dark quilts. The flowers were fresh, cupboards all firmly closed, an ice bucket and polished glasses on a tray. The Observer neatly folded.
Shorty, dressed for the city though in rather an unusually dark tie, opened the door. He was in great command. I saw as he kissed me—the kiss for funerals, excusable now if never again—that he had carefully considered the coming interview. Everything was ready in his head, another part of his work dealt with and completed. 1.—he had thought—Ring Annie. 2. Look up trains for Axminster. 3. Notes for Annie, payment etc., 4. Kiss on arrival.
‘She died in the night. It had been expected,’ he said. ‘Sit down. Have a dr—coffee?’
‘I’m very sorry, Shorty,’ I said when the coffee had come.
He said, ‘It was bad, but quick.’
‘Quick? I thought perhaps years.’
‘Oh—she’d been—ill—for years. But quick last night. They dealt with it very well here. Very well. Better at night of course. Hotel. It’s gotta cost somethin’—’
I shut my eyes.
‘Stretcher. Ambulance. Christ.’
‘Yes.’
‘Now of course I get the rough stuff. Cables. Funerals.’
‘Haven’t you sent cables?’
‘Oh ya. Yep. Comin’ right over. Big family. New York. Comin’ here. There’s goin’ to be big troubles with the will. I’ve had a lot to do there.’ He looked quickly at me, bewildered and I saw in him the confusion I had felt yesterday. He was thinking, ‘Why her? Why does she keep cropping up? Why do I tell her?’
‘Was Lois—did Lois have children?’
‘Nope. Give thanks. Only child, too. Said she’d always wanted a sister. You’d not have thought, to look—
‘Lookit,’ he said, ‘could you do somethin’ for me? I don’t want journalists in on this, so I ask you.’
I thought of the tick and ‘interesting’ and the poor degree he had given me—his scant goodbye. Then of Jane Austen at Sidmouth. But then of the brave crocodile shoes, the fragile old feet, the trembling old hand on the Austen dinner service. She had wanted a sister. I said, ‘Anything I can.’
He sat down at the desk and became at once the professor. He moved papers about, sighed, touched a pen, a pile of notes. He straightened them. His bulging eyes looked only down.
‘It is right up your street, Annie, if I remember. Something that cropped up. I’ll let you in on it. I’ve let a newspaper in on it—that chap yesterday who talks on the box—but only up to a point. They’re paying expenses so you can make ’em high. The American and European rights are about fixed up. I’ve already spat it at my publisher.’
‘What is it?’
‘Well, it’s Jane Austen. Jane Austen again. I’ve been doing a bit of work lately. Lois—Lois and I—we spent a bit of time down in Sidmouth, Devon. Teignmouth, Lyme, Starcross, Portsmouth—those places. We found—lookit, Annie, this is just between ourselves and naturally you gonna get paid—we found a link with Sidmouth. The Sidmouth holiday. 1801. The Sidmouth lover.’
‘A link?’
‘Yes.’ The quick, uneasy look again as if there were something more to be said, something missing he felt he should know. ‘There’s a link. There’s still a link. Near Sidmouth. The three silent years. The “shadowy lover”.’
‘You have found that he existed?’
‘We have found—’ said Shorty Shenfold—he spread great big pink pads of hands on the desk and leaned back. His huge face looked hot. After the rigours of the night he had shaved perfectly, his teeth shone. Tie, collar, hair, everything were immaculate but he seemed sweaty. ‘There is every probability,’ he said, ‘that there are several letters by Jane Austen to the lover still in Devonshire and for sale.’
I said nothing and he went on, ‘For sale today. At an address I’ll give you, Annie. I’ve arranged to meet the woman at three o’clock and to pay a thousand pounds. I’ve worked up to this for more than a year—longer. Then the whole thing gels in a week. It had to be this week.’
‘Gels?’
‘I got an answer—a favourable answer—from the woman who looks after the—owner of the letters. In the end I got her to say the owner—it’s her grandmother—would see me. She says there is a small bundle of Jane Austen’s letters—they’ve always been called that—her grandmother keeps in some box. The grandmother is the great granddaughter of the woman who kept the Sidmouth—or whatever it was—lodging-house. Presumably they were letters from Austen sent to the lover to wait his return. He died and they were never delivered. The bundle is only known within the family. It’s become some sort of talisman—household god.’
‘If they’re unopened,’ I said, ‘how do you know they’re not a laundry list?’
‘Yep. It’s a risk. But worth it. The money is—was—not all that important. Get it paid over today—it’s predated—and we’ll not have to put it in the estate. Lois was loaded.
‘So would you go, Annie? It’s not Sidmouth any more. It’s Charmouth—just down the coast. Probably why they’ve not been discovered—dead-an-alive place. Worse than the rest, which is pushin’ it. You can see Lyme from there. It’s Austen heartland. Maybe you’ll like it. All you do is explain why I can’t be there myself. I’ll give you a letter. I’ll telephone, too, if it’s possible to get a moment.’
‘Do you want me to read them?’
For the first and only time I felt sorry for Shorty. He took almost half a minute to reply. The look came again—maybe if he had not just passed the night he had passed he would have been able to hide it, but he looked quickly, sharply at me as if he were afraid. Afraid that there were something that for once in its career his splendid computer’s brain had missed. And there was something else that made me for that quick moment like him—he was genuinely, genuinely longing to see the bundle, to be the first to hold the beautiful, live writing in his hand.
Yet if they were nothing? A laundry list?
A thousand pounds was from today going to be a thousand pounds. Lois’s tired old claws would be writing no more cheques.
‘Well, you’d better look at them,’ he said at length. ‘Read them. They’ll be all right. I’m pretty sure. They say they’ve never been read. Don’t sound so likely, but you never know. Sound a queer lot, this family.’
‘Get back tonight if you can. Bring them here. Take a taxi soon as you get back to Waterloo. Here’s twenty pounds in case you have to stay over, but try to get back. There’ll be other pay later of course.’
‘I shan’t need paying, Shorty.’
He looked at me with utter hatred because I did not need paying and because I was going to see the letters—and again the troubled look. A ripple of pure annoyance went across the big bumpy forehead, not a thought, nor even quite a feeling; a sort of intuitive shadow that there was something he had missed, something he should have spotted all those years ago when he had looked in to my background before giving me the scholarship to his college in America; when I had written my piece on Love and Privacy.
Which there was. He had forgotten that on my application form it had said where I was born and had lived with my family for twenty years. In ‘Austen heartland’. At Sidmouth.
Enid saw me through the window before I even rang the bell and I saw her purse up her lips in the old way as she made for the door. She said, ‘Well, Annie,’ mouth still tight. There was a fan of lines round her mouth now. She had always pursed her lips when she was trying not to show excitement. It had left a map.
She had grown fatter. Her hair was grey but very neatly permed and set. She wore a home-made linen dress over an acreage of bust. Pearl earrings and a brooch. Presumably all for Shenfold.
‘We expected an American professor and we get you. Well Annie. It’s a very long time.’
‘Did he telephone?’
‘Who?
Telephone? Oh—no. This is some mad American professor trying to offer us a fortune for Gran’s bundle.’
‘He said he’d try to telephone.’
‘You know him? Goodness, Annie, you’re not something to do with it? Anyway, come in.’
The tremendous noise of a racing commentary at full throttle came through the closed sitting room door. ‘Come in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘I’ll make tea. I’m not waiting for this scrounger any longer.’
‘Is Auntie—?’
‘In the sitting room. Sleeps there too now. She feels the cold. And the telly’s in there. I never bother with it.’
‘Feels the cold today!’
‘Yes. You look hot, old Annie. D’you want to go and wash? Did you come by car?’
‘No. Train and bus. The train was late. And boiling.’
I saw her think that I had no car and that I probably hadn’t much of a life otherwise. No proper job, no marriage, only four or five novels in goodness knows how many years. Bits of reviewing. Something insignificant and part-time for the British Council. And after such a good start. Cambridge, then America. She, Enid, had left school at sixteen. She touched her pearls and said, ‘We liked your last book. Well, we’ve liked them all, Gran and I. Why don’t you write more? Something easy and rambly. People round here like them very much you know. They often try and get them out of the library, but it takes so long.’
‘I’m slow too.’
‘You usen’t to be. I’m sure you could write a big book. D’you remember what a lot you used to write when we were little? Uncle couldn’t keep you in notebooks.’
‘Those were the days. Whizzing along with nothing to say. And no problems.’
‘Problems?’ Her eyes asked me to tell her my problems and then looked away with understanding that they were mine. I thought how much I liked my cousin and had always liked her. I wondered why I didn’t come down here often—her comforting goodness, this quiet house, sideways to the sea in the seaside garden, the same french doors still open on to the unpainted, bleached balcony where we had poured sand out of our shoes before meals when I had been over to stay as a child. The sound of the sea loud and lively down the lane.