by Jane Gardam
‘No—I mean writing problems. There were none then. At ten you just go on and on. It’s not like later. It’s fuss, fuss, later—a few pages. Then disgust. Looking out of the window, up at the soles of all the feet going by.’
‘Up at the feet! Good gracious, it’s time you were down here, Annie. Whyever don’t you come back? For a good long time? We’re very quiet. I’m rather—’ she put out cups and saucers on a trolley with the greatest appearance of self-sufficiency and produced a huge home-made cake from a tin, ‘I’m rather lonely I suppose really. Gran’s a jolly good laugh of course.’
‘She must be ninety,’ I said.
‘She’s ninety-six.’
‘Is she well?’
‘She’s very well. The memory comes and goes a bit. Patchy you know. Like a loose connection. But yes, she’s very well. Why don’t you come back? Home and family and all that. After all, they meant a lot to our own famous loose connection didn’t they? Her family never stopped her from writing books—she lived for them, didn’t she? Made all the jam.’ I noticed Enid’s great big bossy jaw again. I said, ‘The Austens weren’t just any family,’ and felt penitent at once when she blushed, hurt.
‘Neither are we just any family. The Austens were very clever—Oxford and Cambridge and Admirals and so on—but nothing out of the way socially. The story goes that to meet them they were nothing out of the way at all.’
I said, ‘You’re like the Irish, still going on about a hundred and fifty years ago. The Austen thing’s a legend, Enid. Thank goodness we’ve always kept it to ourselves and never got shown up about it. It’s nonsense. We’ve all been told for generations that Jane Austen’s lover once put up at some old auntie’s boarding house. There are one or two anecdotes and the famous unopened bundle. Years ago someone should have written a monograph. It’s all probably rubbish.’
‘I always thought you would write a monograph.’
‘I did write something once. If anyone had taken any notice of it I suppose I’d have written more. I didn’t put anything in it that was family gossip though.’
‘What?’
‘I gave it to my American professor. The year I was out there. I hoped he’d ask to talk about it but he just put a tick and said “interesting”.’
‘Well, it was quite good of him to do that if you put nothing new in it.’
‘I didn’t know anything new. Nothing definite. Just yarns. “Jane Austen was so happy”—that stuff.’
‘“Merry”,’ said Enid, ‘not happy. They always said merry. That’s what I was brought up on. “Miss Austen and Miss Jane Austen called and Miss Jane Austen was merry.”’
‘Maybe she’d been at the bottle.’
‘Annie!’
‘There you go,’ I said. ‘Jane-worship. And I’ll bet you haven’t read one of the novels in years.’
‘Jane Austen at the bottle! She never had any experience of that sort of person.’
I thought of Lois and said, ‘Then she was extremely fortunate.’
‘She was sensible about misfortune,’ said Enid. ‘She was thankful for compensations. She was a respectable woman and at a guess I’d say she was very sensible about all the excesses—love and passion and that sort of thing. It’s one of the reasons I would—yes, I don’t care what we’ve always said—I would like to read what’s in Gran’s bundle.’
‘Which is why you’ve decided to sell it to Shorty Shenfold?’
‘I didn’t decide. He pestered away—you never saw such letters he wrote. Solid paragraphs. Bright blue type and paper half an inch thick.’
‘Enid, you don’t need the money.’
‘No. But he sounds respectable. Scholarly. He wrote from Claridges. And he seems to think it is very important. Well, haven’t we a duty when you think about it to read what’s in the packet? But I certainly hadn’t made up my mind.’
‘He told me,’ I said, ‘that you had. And the sale was as good as made.’
‘Rubbish. I’ve hardly mentioned it to Gran yet. I said he could come down and see her if he liked. Anyway, it seems to me that you must have a lot to do with this yourself.’
‘You won’t believe it, but he hasn’t the faintest idea I even know you.’
‘You mean,’ said Enid, looking down her nose as she had done when telling me that the Austens were nothing socially out of the way, ‘you mean that he doesn’t know that we are cousins!’
She pushed the trolley ahead of us in to the sitting room where two exhausted horses were neck and neck and the commentator on the verge of apoplexy. A huddled person pounded the arms of its chair with small blotchy brown claws. The heavy curtains were drawn across the window for a better appreciation of Sandown Park and a huge fire roared in the grate. My great aunt, Enid’s great grandmother, was surrounded by her tools and weapons—a couple of walking sticks, a long picker, several rugs, a box of sweets and a huge black handbag bulging like some old ship come home from the wars. Its ancient cracked sides and loose old tortoiseshell handles brought such a rush of memory I had to sit down—(Annie, here blow your nose. Stop crying, Annie, here’s a Mars bar. No need to run for plasters, Enid, here’s my bag. Yes, and iodine.) I sat down quickly close to her.
‘Here’s Annie, Gran.’
‘Good,’ said my great aunt, ‘I’d five to one on that one.’ She wrote something in a notebook. ‘Did well in the Oaks,’ she told me looking across. ‘What’s this then? The American professor?’
‘No—it’s Annie. The professor isn’t coming. His wife died.’
‘Why should Annie come then? She looks poorly. Smokes too much. Can’t think what she wants with London. Writing those books.’
‘She’s come about your bundle.’
‘Why can’t she write her books down here, that’s what I want to know,’ said Auntie and looked deep in the black bag. She came up with a queer-looking packet of sweets. ‘D’you want a humbug, Annie?’
‘No thanks, Auntie.’
‘That professor sounds a humbug. What d’you want to be working for a humbug for? You could have been a professor yourself if you’d wanted. Could have been anything. I often tell Enid, Annie was the clever one. Could have been anything. She used to write that easy. She might have been writing really well-known books by now, full of descriptions.’
‘Annie’s not exactly working for him—’
‘I dare say she writes clever books. Though I’ve never agreed with that either—for all the Times Littery Whatsit. They can’t be that clever, I said to Enid, or I wouldn’t understand them. Turn the sound down, Annie dear, till the next race. I can’t do with him splurging and yattering.’
I turned it down and the quiet was a blessing.
‘Jane Austen didn’t leave home,’ said Auntie chewing a humbug and watching the commentator’s silent agitations. ‘Never too grand to go and stay with her relations. That’s the tale we were always told anyway.’
‘There were plenty of them,’ I said. ‘Everyone could take turn and turn about. Nowadays—’
‘What’s nowadays?’ said my great aunt. ‘I’ve seen a good deal of nowadays and it’s never any different. What’s this professor after? Does he want to marry you?’
‘No!’
‘All right. I’ve never thought it much mattered anyway. Enid never married—never wanted to. She’s all right. I married and I never stopped wishing I hadn’t. Mind, Annie should have married. She never tells us anything. I tell her it doesn’t matter. She’ll always be Annie.
‘I always liked Annie,’ she said to Enid. ‘I wonder what happened to her? Why don’t she ever come and see us?’
‘She’s here, Gran.’
‘This?’ She looked at me. ‘No, this young woman is an American professor.’
‘It’s Annie.’
‘Annie was always my favourite,’ she told me. ‘Here. Come here.’ She jerked her
wispy head backwards a couple of times for me to come closer. She looked like a cunning old bookie. ‘Enid’s a good woman,’ she said. ‘We get on and she’s a very good girl to me, but Annie—oh Annie was the clever one. It’s a tragedy about Annie. I don’t know who it was or what went wrong. All she does is write these very good books. Books that get wonderful mentions. The kind you’d never see in any shops—’
‘Gran!’
‘I’m leaving the money to Enid,’ said Auntie, ‘and I’m leaving the letters to Annie.’
‘Gran, this is what Annie’s here for. The professor’s sent her with some huge cheque—a thousand pounds. I told you about it.’
‘I never agreed.’
‘No. I know you didn’t. Neither did I. I never said we’d sell the things but—’
‘I should hope not. They’ve been in this family since Lizzie’s mother’s gran.’ She stretched out with the long picker and twitched the television into life. The sound of the next race shook the room. A board stating odds filled the screen. Gran said, ‘Anyway, a thousand’s under-priced.’
When the race was over—it seemed again to have been to her advantage—she said, ‘Trying to get them cheap. American professor!’
I said, ‘Auntie, it’s very good of you. It would be wonderful to have the letters.’
‘Not to sell, mind. We’ve never sold them. It’s a tradition. And it’s a tradition we’ve never looked at them.’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘They’re not to be read.’
‘Gran,’ said Enid, ‘Annie might take advice about that. You know it may be the time has come—’
‘No. No. They’re not to be read. It says on the packet who they’re for. He never came for them. You don’t read other folk’s letters. Postcards maybe.’
‘Auntie—’
‘It says who they’re for on the envelopes.’
‘Then you’ve looked?’
She began to show the bag again.
‘Gran, have you opened the bundle?’
‘I’ve read the fronts of the envelopes, that’s all,’ and she brought out a very small and thin paper package wrapped in oilskin.
‘It’s been wrapped in oilskin since long since. Like a baccy pouch. Ever since Lizzie’s mother’s gran. Nobody came for it. Mind you she moved soon after, Lizzie’s mother’s gran. She moved here from Sidmouth. She kept it on her mantelpiece a long while, troubled about it. Lizzie’s mother grew up with it. She always thought of it as something to do with the sea, being in oilskin.’
I said, ‘Maybe they were written to a sailor. Some people say the young man was a sailor. Jane Austen loved sailors,’—and was surprised by a shining hard look, steady and shrewd from under Auntie’s eyebrows. My heart began to beat fast. I said, ‘It’s terribly hot in here. I’m sorry. Look I must go outside,’ and she said, ‘Well here then, Annie,’ and tossed the little packet in to my lap. ‘It’s yours by rights,’ she said. ‘I’ve always felt it. That American can do without it. Have it now. Why wait till I’m dead? It’s yours, Annie, being bookish.’
‘Will you come back, Annie?’
Enid and I were on the verandah. I was writing to Shorty—very fast to catch the next post—saying that it had all been a mistake. The letters if they still existed were not for sale. They had been given to a relative and—lost track of. He might like to come and talk about it to the family but I felt it was too late.
‘You are writing fast. Like old times.’
I said I was just enclosing the cheque, saying it was all off and that if he liked—did she mind?—that he could come down and see for himself.
‘Yes of course,’ she said. ‘There’s probably nothing in the packet you can still read anyway. Poor Gran. And poor Annie! It’s not much of an inheritance. All this secrecy and I’ll bet it’s a hoax. I mean she’d have got them back, wouldn’t she—Jane Austen? She’d have moved heaven? Her love letters?’
‘You’d think so,’ I said. ‘It depends what sort of a state she was in. We can’t tell—there was a family silence about it. We won’t find the truth about that now.’
‘If they are Jane Austen’s letters, Annie, will they—would they—honestly mean anything much?’
‘They would be a terrific find,’ I said.
‘Would they?’
‘Yes. Written when she was in love. The critics would go wild. Her sister burned everything to do with that time you know. There’s not a letter, not a scratch of Jane Austen’s pen for three years. We don’t even know the man’s name. It was Jane Austen’s wish—so it’s said. She wanted no speculation. No sharing.’
‘But d’you think anyone—the sister, us—has the right to destroy—?’
‘Cassandra knew her sister.’
‘She didn’t know her sister was a—well, a genius. She didn’t know how famous she was going to be.’
I said I didn’t think that would have made the least difference.
Enid came to the gate with me and stood leaning on it. The honeysuckle hedge beside her smelled of nutmeg. Behind her the verandah doors stood open and beyond them and within could be heard the fanfare announcing the television evening news, full strength for Auntie.
‘I wish you were nearer, Annie.’
‘I wish I were, too. I’ve loved today. It’s just that in London there’s more chance—oh, of meeting up with old friends I suppose.’
‘A melancholy situation. Depending on people from the past.’
I said, ‘Could I come down in the autumn—for a long time, three weeks or so?’ and she looked so thrilled that I at once felt hostile, manipulated. I said, ‘Well anyway a fortnight,’ hating myself. The old guilt was back, the old problem, the hostility, the fight between love and privacy.
Enid blew her nose very thoroughly and said, ‘There’s a good little hairdresser down here, too. You could get your hair done properly. And there’s quite a lot of Bridge.’
She touched the pearls.
When she had gone in I walked to the end of the lane, but then I turned left to the sea instead of right to the bus-stop which would direct me somewhere or other for the night. I walked along the sands, weaving through the sandcastles and spades, the families gathered together in clumps on rugs, over splendid drains and moats and driftwood bridges, over and beyond the spatter of paper cups and tin cans spilling from litter bins, beyond the tussocks of grey-green grass, towards the sand hills and the cliffs.
The sand hills were nearly empty now—people were dragging back to their high tea, tired and sandy and hot. I sat looking at the sea as it tilted slowly from the sun. The ripples thickened and the waves seemed to grow slow, soften, breathe more deep. I opened the old seaweed envelope and read the two envelopes within, the unmistakable handwriting clearer even than yesterday’s at Chawton. I opened each envelope and read the signature which was as expected and then I burned both letters and both envelopes with my cigarette lighter.
Then I sat for goodness knows how long, but the sun was nearly gone by the time I came back to myself, so I think it must have been several hours. I took the half-handful of ash down to the water’s edge and paddled a fairway out and scattered it. Jane Austen had very much liked Charmouth Bay. ‘The happiest spot,’ she said, ‘for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation.’ I let a very small wisp of her melt into it.
That night I fell asleep in a bed-and-breakfast place at Sidmouth utterly certain that I had done right. I woke in the night and I still felt certain. And I have not changed my mind. I have felt very happy ever since that I of all people have had the chance of paying back a little of a great debt.
I haven’t seen Shorty again. He didn’t answer my letter, though he did go down to Charmouth to try his luck with Auntie. Enid said it was not a success. He got nowhere, Auntie insisting that he was a member of the C.I.A. or the President of the Unit
ed States for whom it seems she has little time.
Nor has he written to me, but he is alive and well, for last Christmas, when I was down with Enid, she suddenly spotted him in an old Tatler and Queen. She sat upright and said ‘Gracious!’—and there he was, unchanged, after all these years. He was in Dublin, lecturing on something unpleasant he had discovered about Yeats, and beside him, in the glorious parkland surrounding her house, was a gaunt and beautiful American-Irish widow.
Shenfold looked splendid—hair a thought longer, just a touch of grey, still vigorous, vibrant, an Olympian. Good for another thirty years.
‘He’s attractive,’ said Enid. ‘Powerful. You can see he’s never missed a thing. Doesn’t the woman look tired?’
A SPOT OF GOTHIC
I was whizzing along the road out of Wensleydale through Low Thwaite beyond Naresby when I suddenly saw a woman at her cottage gate, waving at me gently like an old friend. In a lonely dale this is not very surprising, as I had found out. Several times I have met someone at a lane end flapping a letter that has missed the post in Kirby Thore or Hawes. ‘It’s me sister’s birthday tomorrow. I near forgot’ or ‘It’s the bill fort telephone. We’ll be cut off next thing.’ The curious thing about this figure, so still and watchful, was that it was standing there waving to me in the middle of the night.
It was full moon. I had been out to dinner at Mealbeck. I had only been living in the North for two months and for one month alone. I had joined my husband near Catterick camp the minute he had found us a house, which was only a few days before he found that the regiment was being posted to Hong Kong. The house he had found was beautiful, old and tall in an old garden, on the edge of a village on the edge of the fell. It was comfortable and dark with a flagged floor and old furniture. Roses and honeysuckle were nearly strangling black hedges of neglected yew. There was nice work to be done.