Mrs Gaskell and Me

by Nell Stevens

  We go to the bar, where there are two available stools, but not next to each other. A woman sitting alone in between them notices us hovering awkwardly nearby and moves across, making a big show of sliding her bags and drink over. ‘There you go,’ she says, loudly, and I smile at her, and notice that she is redeyed and a little wobbly as she readjusts in her new place.

  ‘How are you?’ asks Max, once we’re sitting and have ordered drinks.

  I don’t know how to answer. I think about climbing the steps up through Morningside Park every morning, and about the forced, awkward conversations I made with my dates, all of whom were hand-picked by the match-making agency, all of whom ate dairy, all of whom were pleasant, none of whom seemed interested or interesting. I think about Dr Maier’s office with its window looking out at the traffic along Broadway. You are talking like a bereaved person, Dr Maier said, and now the ghost of the man I lost is sitting next to me on a bar stool drinking a beer and waiting for me to answer his question.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve missed you too,’ says Max, and he reaches out and squeezes my hand.

  ‘You guys are so adorable.’

  I swivel on my stool to see who has spoken. It’s the woman who gave up her seat for us. She has ordered another drink, over which she is leaning unsteadily. She bends to sip from a straw.

  ‘You are the cutest couple,’ she says.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘thanks.’ I turn back to Max.

  ‘How long have you guys been together?’ she asks.

  I turn again and push my stool back from the bar so that Max can see her. I look at him with my lips pressed together in a way I hope communicates: you take this one.

  Max, ever the lawyer, chooses his words carefully. ‘We’ve known each other for three years.’

  Our new friend, after however many drinks she has had, does not appreciate the subtle clarification in his answer. ‘Three years?’ she screeches. She looks at me with horror in her eyes. ‘You’ve been together three years and you haven’t gotten him to marry you yet?’

  ‘Nope,’ I say. ‘I haven’t.’

  She shakes her head. ‘What is it?’ she says to Max. ‘You think she’s not good enough for you? Is that it?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘That is not it.’

  ‘You think you’re going to find someone better than her? Because let me tell you, buddy, that ain’t gonna happen. Can’t you see how much she loves you? Can’t you see the way she looks at you? You think you’re gonna find someone who loves you more than this one?’

  Our conversation has attracted the attention of the bartender, who is looking apologetic, and as though he thinks he should intervene.

  ‘That’s not it,’ says Max.

  ‘Look at her cheeks!’ the woman says. ‘You think you’re going to find someone with cuter cheeks than this one?’

  ‘OK,’ the bartender says. ‘That’s enough. Leave these people be, OK?’

  ‘We’re just talking,’ she says. ‘I’m just saying, he thinks he’s going to find someone with cuter cheeks?’

  The last we see of the woman, she is being ushered away by a security guard toward the lifts. She leaves a strained silence in her wake. Max takes a gulp from his drink, and I draw patterns with my finger in the ring of liquid left behind by his glass on the surface of the bar.

  ‘So is that it?’ I say, eventually. ‘You think you’re going to find someone with cuter cheeks?’

  Part Three

  SLEEP STUDY

  2015

  Treehouse

  Looking down from my new bedroom, I can see chickens scratching in the dirt, pecking at grass. A cat is sprawled out in a dusty flower bed, watching the birds and flicking its tail. Dangling from the lower branches of a tree, wind chimes sway silently; there is barely a breeze. Everything is slow, calm. Flies buzz around the window screen.

  This is my second week in Austin. I am living in a treehouse. In my haze of depression after the breakup with Max – those months of public crying in London, of weeping in Dr Maier’s office in New York – I could barely think as far ahead as my next meal, let alone to where I might stay in Texas. By the time I got around to sorting it out, everything on the accommodation list provided by the university was taken; I sifted through online listings and realized that a treehouse in the back yard of a wind-chime-maker called Norma was the best I could expect to find. I have running water, a fridge, a microwave and air conditioning, which is all I really need. At night, I listen to the scratching of squirrels’ feet as they scurry over the roof above my bed.

  It is peaceful here, and life is very easy: I take a shuttle bus from outside Norma’s house every day to the archives, where they give their research fellows free coffee and office space, and the food in all the nearby cafes is excellent. After days spent reading the letters and journals of William Wetmore Story, I go home and sip wine at the window of my treehouse, watching animals crawl, flutter and swagger around the yard. I have decided that in these four months, I am going to finish my thesis. I am in the third and final year of my Ph.D., and after two and a half years of academic dabbling interrupted by fairly constant obsession with Max, it is time to get it done.

  It is eight months since Boston’s snow emergency, since that awful Skype call, since Max did not get on the plane to London. It is shocking to realize that his absence no longer shocks me. If there is a hole in my life where he used to be, its edges are smoothed over, no longer jagged. Max and I are still on speaking terms – I call to tell him what I am doing, he calls to talk about a short story he’s working on – but these conversations are, for the most part, calm, comfortable, no longer angry. I have absorbed the wreck of the relationship somehow, and though I still worry about my future, about whether, when and how I will ever have a baby, about who, how and when I will date again, the very presence of these questions in my life no longer feels like a catastrophe. I do not know how this has come about – it has happened almost against my will – but it seems I have run out of grief. Sometimes that strikes me as sad in its own way: he was the source of so much happiness, and then so much pain, and now even that is gone.

  A far more pressing blot on my contentment is that I have developed a constant need to pee. I am spending a lot of time reading and writing, but, it seems, even more time buttoning and unbuttoning my jeans as I run to the bathroom again and again. It is worst at night. Just when I’ve settled, teeth brushed, lights off, my bladder starts to sting, and I have to scurry out of bed again. In the reading room at the Ransom Center, where comings and goings are observed by the hyper-vigilant staff whose job it is to monitor the readers at all times, my constant bathroom trips are becoming an embarrassment. No sooner have I sat down in the mornings, it seems, than I have to leave again.

  I go to a pharmacy and buy little paper sticks that promise to detect a urinary tract infection. I conduct several tests over several days, each time with normal results, before I accept that I do not have a UTI. So: it must be in my head, I think. Maybe my bladder is clinging on to my breakup sadness; maybe my urge to pee is in fact an urge to get rid of the last vestiges of unhappiness left behind by Max. I sign up to do yoga in a little room above a pet-grooming shop: at the start of the class, the teacher places her hands in a prayer position and invites Jesus to join us in our practice. Maybe yoga, maybe Jesus in downward dog, will calm my agitated bladder.

  The Harry Ransom Center is a haven for the obsessed. All around us is Texas: dry sunlight, cowboy boots and a new piece of legislation that allows students to carry concealed weapons on campus; country music drifts out of every bar in town. But here, in the archives, are the papers of D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Dylan Thomas, Tom Stoppard, and buzzing around them like flies to a corpse are scholars from all over the world.

  On Wednesdays, we gather in a stuffy meeting room for the weekly coffee morning. We stand around with paper cups, balancing plates of dry marble cake in our free hands, and we talk about the people whose papers w
e have come to see. The coffee mornings feel, most often, like a meeting of deputies: we are all there on behalf of someone else. I am representing William Wetmore Story, and I talk to other people about him, and they reply with an anecdote about their own subject, until it becomes apparent that the conversation is not really between me and the other person, but a strange conversation-by-proxy between Story and whoever it is they are researching: Ian McEwan, J. M. Coetzee, Christine Brooke-Rose.

  ‘Story had a theory about drawing,’ I say. ‘He believed that the proportions for best drawing the human figure were derived from an ancient cabalistic formula.’

  ‘Well of course,’ says an earnest young Dutch man, ‘Evelyn Waugh actually studied drawing alongside religion. He studied medieval-style illumination.’

  When I first started at King’s, I looked at the girl with Dickens’ signature tattooed on her arm with a kind of horror. She had been so consumed by her subject that it had branded her as its own; she belonged to Dickens just as much as he to her. But in Texas, it is clear that each and every researcher, myself included, is wandering around bearing the standard of their chosen subject. I wave my William Wetmore Story flag in between mouthfuls of cake on Wednesday mornings. I read his letters, his notebooks, his journals, and at home in the evenings, I write.

  There is a melancholy to the archives, too, but it is a comfortable, wistful sadness that feels wholesome compared to the bitter heartbreak that dominated my previous year. Story’s notebooks detail ideas and plans, detritus from a busy, living mind that is now gone. In the middle of an essay on the merits and pitfalls of literary translation is a sketch of his infant son, sitting on the floor beside his desk. Beneath a journal entry describing an experiment in spiritualist mind-reading is a drawing of a woman labelled ‘Model for Marguerite’. The face of the girl is shadowy, thoughtful, eyes lowered. There is an unsent, unfinished letter to an unnamed recipient, letting him or her know that a flute was left behind when they dined together at the Palazzo Barberini, and that he would give it to the Brownings to take up to Florence when they left the following week.

  These papers are a record of what is no longer here: the flute, the owner of the flute, the woman who posed as ‘Marguerite’, the mind that saw and recorded them all. The infant sitting chubbily on the floor in the pencil sketch grew up, became a man, became old, died. The world Story inhabited, the Rome of my fantasies, in which the great and good of nineteenth-century Letters rub shoulders and throw parties and create works of genius and leave behind musical instruments, has vanished. The people in whose company I have spent so much of the past three years? They are all dead.

  Story believed that he could tell the character of a letter-writer simply by holding the paper, without reading a word. I sit with his writing for days on end and wonder if I’m any closer to him, his life, his friends. The notebooks are impossible to read in parts: the handwriting too messy to decipher, or the pages torn. I am terrified, as I leaf through, that the paper will disintegrate under my fingers. Other scholars are given white cotton gloves to wear while reading old material – they look like mimes as, all around me in the reading room, they lift and turn, meticulous and slow, the ancient papers – but the Story archive is considered either not delicate or not significant enough to warrant protective clothing.

  I teach myself, over time, to decipher the variety and tenor of Story’s moods through his handwriting: the calm, dreamy tilt of his happier moments, the frantic scrawl of a note dashed off in bitterness. Perhaps, after all, I am reaching a kind of intimacy with my subject. And then I find a poem, so messily written that hours of staring at certain words don’t help me decipher them.

  What avails in the end all our striving my friend

  I ask what’s the use of it all

  In struggle and strife we [battle?] through life

  And our climbing all ends with a fall

  Thought comes to its flower at times for an hour

  In a moment – then withers and dies

  And strive all we will with our utmost of skill

  The [??] we seek, Life denies.

  For at best, what is fame, but a breath of a name

  And success, but an empty vaunt

  We all are pursuing, in hoping and doing [??]

  ?? phantoms that lure but to taunt lurk but to haunt?? Live but to haunt?

  Like the waves of the sea [??] [??] [??] restlessly

  We strive scarcely knowing for what

  But to shirk from life’s Light – to be [??] out of sight

  To be dashed on Death’s shore and forgot.

  Later, I read a letter from Mrs Gaskell to Story and his wife, written in September 1857, a few months after she had left their house to return to Manchester. ‘It was in those charming Roman days that my life, at any rate, culminated,’ she wrote. ‘I shall never be so happy again. I don’t think I was ever so happy before. My eyes fill with tears when I think of those days, and it is the same with all of us. They were the tip-top point of our lives. The girls may see happier ones – I never shall.’

  Will I see happier days? Has my life, at any rate, culminated? I am recovering from a year spent believing that it had, looking backwards as I trudged up the steps through Morningside Park, replaying moments, thinking I shall never be so happy as I swallowed the pills prescribed by Dr Maier. But it seems to me that I have reached a point of anticipation again: I can no longer be as certain as Mrs Gaskell was about the trajectory of my life. I can no longer accept without doubt that my happiness has peaked.

  So here I am, waiting. I am optimistic. As I sit in the archives opening box after box of William Story’s papers, I am full of hope that the tip-top point of my life did not take place in Shu’s apartment when Max said, ‘I’m going to try something, OK?’, was not a moment on the Cape Cod beach with my toes touching his through the sand, but is ahead of me, unknowable.

  1859

  Sylvia’s Lovers

  You lapsed into wistfulness. In the autumn, you left Mr Gaskell in Manchester and took a trip to Whitby. From a rugged little cottage on the coast, you gazed out every morning at the grey sea gnawing the grey rocks. You were looking towards the Continent, towards the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, but you imagined it was the Atlantic you were watching, that beyond the waves and the horizon was America. In the evenings, when the sun sank into the water behind clouds and lit up the sky in pearlescent streaks, you almost thought you saw it.

  Twenty-five miles away, in Redcar, Nathaniel Hawthorne was working on a novel you had heard would be about Rome. It was to feature Mr Story’s statue of Cleopatra, which you yourself had seen in his studio. There were to be little sketches of all your friends in the city. The thought of Hawthorne being nearby, of the little bud of Italy that was blossoming from his pen, made you think of the place with refreshed intensity. It was a kind of homesickness – you used the German word, Heimweh, to describe it – the way your mind took you back, in dreams and daydreams and fantasies, to Rome. When Mr Norton wrote to you, I revisit in imagination the places to which we went together, I recall our drives & the beauties of the Campagna, I hear your words, & altogether I am passing a very delightful morning with you in Rome, you knew exactly what he meant. You were there too, at his side.

  When the Hawthorne book was published, Norton wrote to you about it: I know nothing that has ever been written about Italy so admirably true not only to the reality of the country but also to all that it suggests to the imagination. Hawthorne’s remarkable fineness of perception & observation, and the intensity of his imagination have enabled him to put into words & to give form to what every lover of Italy & Rome has felt while there, but which very few have been able to express for themselves.

  One morning, as you read The Times over your coffee, you saw an announcement that your old friend Eliza ‘Tottie’ Fox had got married in Rome. She was a painter, and had moved there the previous year, and you had become lazy about writing to each other since then. And now, all of a sudden, she was ma
rried. You held the paper in both hands and read and re-read the article. You were unsure what you were feeling.

  Marianne wandered into the room and saw your face. ‘Mama, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ you said, ‘yes, look. Tottie has got married in Rome.’

  Marianne came over to look at the article, and read it quickly. ‘Oh, that’s wonderful,’ she said, searching your face as though uncertain that this was the reaction you wanted.

  ‘Yes,’ you said. ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Your daughter’s words nudged your own emotions in the direction of delight, and soon your confusion left you altogether. You wrote a long, gushing letter to Tottie.

  Fancy meeting your fate at Rome. (I dreamt of you and your husband at Albano, in the gardens of the Villa Medici – think of me if you go there.) Where were you lodging at Rome? What were you married in? Roman scarves and cameos? Oh, and is not Rome above every place you imagined? And do you go to the Pamphile Doria gardens, and gather anemonies, and watch the little green lizards as we did?

  You tried to tell her, without saying so directly, that you, too, knew what it was to meet your fate at Rome.

  Charles Eliot Norton: We have places here in our circle for you all. Why are you not here to fill them? How pleasant it would be to bid you Goodnight with the thought of meeting you tomorrow at breakfast. It is one of the hopes that I will never give up, that some day or another you will be here… . But will it ever be? Today at least my hope is strong.

  Mrs Gaskell: I wish you would come to see us; every now and then we hear a rumour that you are coming, but you don’t come. I – we all – wish you would.

  CEN: We are not so very far apart after all. – I will imagine myself sitting in your well-remembered pleasant parlor talking with you.

  EG: If you were here I should have such numbers of things to talk over with you that scarcely seem worth putting in a letter; a letter too, that is to cross the Atlantic and so ought to be full of great subjects, greatly treated.