Mrs Gaskell and Me

by Nell Stevens

  At your window in Whitby, looking out over the ocean, at the fishing crews setting sail in the morning, and returning with full nets at night, and at the road that ran around the harbour, where, sometimes, people waited for the men to return from sea, you began to think about a new story. Whitby gave a rhythm and form to your own longings. You began to shape the restless yearning you had grown so accustomed to feeling over the past eighteen months into a plot.

  Your heroine, Sylvia, is a vibrant, impulsive girl, who falls in love and becomes engaged to a rakish sailor called Charley. Her dull, religious cousin, Hepburn, who is also in love with her, witnesses Charley being captured by a press gang, but decides not to tell Sylvia, letting her believe that Charley has died. Mourning and alone, Sylvia agrees, reluctantly, to marry Hepburn, but all the while her love is alive, at sea, desperate to come home to her.

  When, when are you coming to England dear Mr Norton? you wrote. You were standing at the shore, waiting for a ship to appear on the horizon. I always look over the names of the American passengers, thinking you may have come.

  EG: I have been hoping and hoping and wishing for letters from you.

  CEN: Three years ago we met in Rome!

  EG: The Campagna ‘bits’ in your letters always give one a sort of Heimweh.

  CEN: For truly have you not made me feel at home with you, and how can one help desiring to know all home affairs & news?

  EG: Yesterday … Meta and I were having a long, yearning talk about America, and our dear friends there. I am not sure that we did not shake hands upon a resolution that if we lived we would go over to America. I know we calculated time & expense, & knocked off Niagara, because we would rather see friends.

  CEN: I am very glad that you are going to send me a photograph of yourself, and I shall thank you for it with warmest thanks if it be truly like you. I do not want to have to suit the truthful portrait in my memory to any unfamiliar look, and I would keep that image unchanged until the time when I may see you again.

  EG: I think Rome grows almost more vivid in recollection as the time recedes. Only the other night I dreamed of a breakfast – not a past breakfast, but some mysterious breakfast which neither has been, nor, alas! would be – in the Via Sant’Isidoro dining room, with the amber sunlight streaming on the gold-grey Roman roofs and the Sabine hills on one side and the Vatican on the other. I sometimes think that I would almost rather never have been there than have this ache of yearning.

  2015

  Sleep Study

  I am registering with a doctor in Austin when I see the advert for the Sleep Study. It is printed on pink paper, and pinned to the noticeboard in the doctor’s waiting room. The language is what catches my eye at first, glaring and familiar. It is written in the same, apparently universal, optimistic tone of the equivalents I saw in London: Sad and struggling to sleep? Sad and sleeping soundly? Seeking volunteers with mild to moderate depression to participate in residential study. Volunteers will be awarded $1000 on successful completion of the study. The bottom of the flyer has been cut into tabs, each printed with an email address. Two have already been torn off.

  I go in to see a doctor, who tests my urine, confirms that I really do not have a UTI, and suggests I may have something called interstitial cystitis, which is like cystitis, except without the presence of any real infection, and therefore not really treatable.

  ‘What causes it?’ I say.

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Is that a way of saying it’s in my head?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘How do I get rid of it?’ I say.

  The doctor says I should stop taking vitamin tablets, which I previously considered as my one truly healthy habit.

  On the way out of the medical centre, almost without really deciding to, I tear off an email address from the bottom of the Sad and Struggling to Sleep poster.

  The study will be carried out over a two-week period during which you will not leave the Sleep Centre. Prior to commencing participation in the study, you will be interviewed by a researcher about your personal history of depression, as well as your sleep cycle and habits, to check you are eligible to participate. At this time, you will be assigned a subject number, by which you will be referred to for the duration of the study.

  The sleep research unit is bunker-like and echoey. On the day of my screening appointment, I follow the doctor down a flight of stairs into a fluorescent-lit, controlled environment, where the walls are painted a disconcertingly dark shade of green. It feels a little like how I imagine a submarine to be. I sit on the edge of a bed to have my blood taken by a nurse who glares disapprovingly at my forearms and complains that I ‘do not have good veins for cannulization’. The doctor, waiting by the door, makes a note of this. I watch my blood turn the syringe dark.

  The residential session will take place in the Research Center’s Sleep Unit. It will last fourteen days (three hundred and thirty-six hours). When you arrive at the unit your bag will be searched and any items not allowed e.g. medication, chewing gum, will be stored safely and returned to you on discharge. You will be asked to perform a breathalyzer test to ensure that you have not been drinking alcohol.

  You will only be able to use your phone between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. each day. Cell phones, watches and laptops will be collected by staff each evening and returned to you in the morning. You will sleep alone in an individual sleep cell. Your posture, meals and the lighting levels will be carefully controlled during the study.

  In the doctor’s office, he hands me an information pack, and then proceeds to read the whole thing out loud, word for word. I don’t know where to look as he reads. There are no windows to gaze out of. For a while I follow along on the page as he describes procedures for checking into the unit that sound more like admission to prison than to a voluntary medical study. My mind begins to wander: I am in the midst of constructing a fantasy experiment in which Mrs Gaskell and William Wetmore Story and Harriet Hosmer are all inhabitants of the Sleep Unit, willing participants in my research, on hand to answer questions as I complete my thesis, when I hear the doctor mention that there can be no caffeine consumption for seven days prior to, and throughout, the study.

  ‘Like, really none?’ I ask.

  ‘Absolutely none.’

  ‘I will get such bad headaches,’ I say.

  The doctor looks as though he does not know what to do with this information, and then says, ‘If that’s true, you should probably consider cutting down in any case,’ and continues to go over the other regulations: no anti-inflammatory drugs, no non-prescription drugs, no alcohol, no strenuous exercise.

  He gives me a questionnaire to fill out – the kind with which I’m quite familiar, following the Body Study in my first year. In the past two weeks I have felt: angry peaceful jittery lonely energetic playful hopeless grouchy composed. I mark each emotion out of ten.

  In the daytime, study participants are able to move freely between their individual sleep cells and the communal area. You are able to socialize with other participants. You are not allowed to leave the Sleep Unit. At 6 p.m. each evening, participants must return to their sleep cells. You will not leave your sleep cell until 9 a.m. the following day. On odd nights, you will sleep between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., lying on your bed in darkness. On even nights, you will sit up in bed in dim light, and will remain awake. You will be awake from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. the following day (forty continuous waking hours). On both odd and even nights, you will have electrodes attached to your head and a cannula (fine plastic tube) inserted into a forearm vein. We will measure your EEG (brain waves). Blood samples to be taken at regular intervals.

  Of all the studies in which I have participated since the beginning of my Ph.D., this is the most extreme. I have never in my life stayed awake for forty hours straight, and I genuinely do not know if I have it in me to do it. It was all I could do to drink a glass of amino acid. It is, of course, also by far the best paid of all the studies I’ve seen, but now tha
t I am no longer scrimping and saving to buy Eurostar tickets or transatlantic flights, perhaps it isn’t necessary.

  The doctor gives me a tour, showing me the communal area with sofas and a television, and then an ‘individual sleep cell’. If the whole unit feels like a submarine, the sleep cell looks like the place they keep the missiles. It is a metal-walled box, with cameras in each corner of the ceiling pointed towards a narrow white mattress. The doctor shows me dials that control the temperature, light level and bed angle. There are small tubes trailing through the walls towards the bed. These, he says, connect to the cannula in the subject’s arm, and allow for blood to be drawn from outside the cell without disturbing the subject if he or she is asleep. This, more than anything else, disturbs me. Sleep deprivation, living underground for two weeks, these things are challenges; an invisible person, on the other side of a metal wall, sucking blood from my sleeping body feels intimate, vampiric.

  It is a relief, when the screening is over, to emerge out into the yellow Texas light. The world up at ground level is warm and bright and unsanitized and haphazard; cars pass by on the road and trees sway and when I get back to Norma’s house the chickens have escaped their coop and she is running around the yard trying to coax them back in.

  A few days later, while I am in the reading rooms leafing through Elizabeth Barrett Browning letters, my phone buzzes. A librarian looks over, not exactly disapprovingly, but pointedly enough to make it clear that this should not happen again. I slide my phone onto my lap, silence it, and then open my inbox. There is an email from the Sleep Study researcher.

  Dear Nell,

  Thank you for your interest in participating in our research study on sleep disruption and depression. Unfortunately, following your screening appointment at the unit, you were found to be ineligible for the following reason(s):

  Reason for non-inclusion of subject: depression is not present in the subject.

  Thank you again for taking the time to attend the screening appointment.

  I read the message through again, and have to repress the urge to laugh. It had not occurred to me, at least not in such unequivocal terms, that I might not be sad any more. Months have passed since I last sat in Dr Maier’s office, overlooking Broadway, telling her about my grief. And when I think about my life since then – the move to Austin, the treehouse, the comfortable wistfulness I feel reading the letters and notes left behind by William Wetmore Story and his friends – I realize that the researchers are right. Depression is not present in the subject.

  2015

  Great News

  On the plane, I try to imagine how it will be. A few days away from the archives. A beach. Nice weather. Good food. I let my head fall against the window, where ice crystals are forming around the edges. We pass a pillar of cloud, its wisps reaching out like hands towards the aircraft’s wing.

  Max is in LA for a week, setting up meetings with agents and producers, touting a new script. He is renting an apartment, and has invited me to stay for a few days. Unlike my first visit to see him in Paris, there is no confusion about who will sleep where this time: there are two bedrooms. We are being very mature and organized. Max has saved up money in order to afford the trip, and has planned an itinerary of easy, pleasant activities for the time I’ll be here. It will be a friendly visit, and that is all. Still, as he drives me back to his place from LAX, his right hand is lying on the armrest between us and instinctively I reach out and put mine over it. He doesn’t react for a moment, then turns it palm up so he can lace his fingers through mine.

  In Los Angeles, the light is thicker and yellower even than in Austin, and it clings to everything and makes everyone look attractive: Max, of course, and me, too, when I catch sight of my reflection in car windows and shopfronts. I feel light on my feet, and calm. Max wants to show me the whole city, which means spending a huge amount of time in the rental car, sitting in traffic on our way between Malibu beach and the Griffith Observatory and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. On each journey our hands find each other, and then, one evening, when we have had a few drinks and are walking arm in arm back towards the apartment after dinner, it feels natural, inevitable even, that we should kiss, that we should hurry home, that we should spend the night in the same bed all over again. In the months before I got here I did a lot of thinking, a lot of reasoning with myself, about why my relationship with Max is really over, why it could never work, why its demise – so shocking at the time – had been inevitable from the start. But if this is a holiday from my work at the archives, could it not also be a holiday from worrying about all of that? I don’t want to think any more.

  Izra texts. ‘So are you guys back together, or … ?’ and I don’t reply.

  Louise: ‘Please tell me you did not have sex with him.’

  We take a train to Santa Barbara, the track skimming along the coast, all palm trees and blue sea and smooth, easy views. We join a vineyard tour, run by a small, intense Argentinian man called Tomas, who leads tastings in several wineries and tells us that ‘the key to a good wine is the story behind it; you can taste if a wine was made with inspiration, with drama, with love.’ I try my best, with each sip, to identify the drama and the love. The day passes in a haze, and Max and I can’t stop touching each other and laughing at the kinds of jokes we used to make when we were together and Tomas says, ‘I used to do a lot of bachelor, bachelorette parties, this kind of thing. Now I prefer to take smaller groups. I like the romantic couples. I like people who can taste the stories.’ He beams at us and I feel oddly proud.

  That evening, on the train back to the city, I can barely keep my eyes open. Max is dozing. I start to feel unwell. I have had too much to drink. There is a pain in my stomach, on the right-hand side, as though my insides are punishing me for the wine; they are writhing and twisting.

  To distract myself, I look at my phone. Izra again: ‘MAX UPDATE PLEASE. What is going on?’ And a message from Alice, my brother’s girlfriend: ‘Hey! How are you? How’s Texas? Do you want to speak on Skype?’

  I close my eyes. The train thrums past the dark ocean.

  The next morning, Max has booked a table for us to have brunch at a hotel near his apartment. We get dressed slowly, slightly hungover, and step out into the sunshine. Alice has messaged again: ‘Hi! How are you? Are you free to Skype today?’ I respond: ‘I’m good! I’m in LA visiting a friend at the moment – shall we catch up next weekend?’

  The walk from the apartment to the hotel takes us past mansions, gaudy and ornate, and as our heads begin to clear we play a game, choosing new homes for ourselves, new fantasy lives: I’ll have this one, but I’d get rid of the fountains and plant more trees; I’ll take this one, but change the pink front door.

  ‘How much do these places cost?’ I ask. ‘Millions?’

  ‘Millions and millions.’

  ‘Oh, well, maybe when you sell the new screenplay,’ I suggest, grinning, and then realize at once that this was the wrong thing to say. I have broken the unspoken rule that has, until now, been keeping this trip idyllic and sanguine: not to mention real life, not to revisit any of the factors that had contributed to our breakup, which included, but were not limited to: distance, money, uncertainty over Max’s career and his writing.

  ‘Maybe when I’m done with the archives in Austin, I could come to Boston for a few days,’ I say, trying to change the subject. ‘It could be fun. We could have dinner at Lineage. We could get the fish tacos.’

  ‘That would be great,’ says Max, and then a moment later, ‘except that Lineage closed. It shut down a while ago.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Well, I guess we’ll have to go somewhere else,’ but already the idea feels duller, less plausible, and we finish the walk to brunch in silence.

  At the hotel, there’s a band playing jazz in the courtyard, and there are flowers everywhere, and vines swaying overhead, and at the table next to ours a chihuahua in a velvet coat with ‘Beverley Hills’ written across the back in diamanté is being fed pi
eces of ham by a blonde woman. My pocket buzzes with another text from Alice: ‘It would be great to speak today, if possible.’

  I put my phone face down on the table and wish she could have taken the hint. I’m busy. I’m with Max. A Skype chat with her and my brother sounds very nice, but it is the last thing I want to do today, when I am here in this glinting city and am determined not to think about anything. Then, I think how unlike her it is to be so pushy, that there must be something serious she needs to discuss. Surely, she wouldn’t ignore my protestations that I’m too busy to speak, unless it were something serious.

  ‘Do you mind if I call my brother quickly?’ I say to Max. ‘His girlfriend has been trying to get hold of me, and I think something might be wrong.’

  ‘Sure,’ he says, and I make the call.

  The line is busy, and it is at this point that I start to panic. As Max orders drinks and food, my mind is turning over the scenarios that could possibly lead to Alice trying to contact me so urgently, and then being unavailable when I call. There must be something wrong with my brother, I think, otherwise he would tell me himself. But if something was wrong with my brother, then my parents would be the ones to let me know. So, it must be something wrong with my parents – both of them, otherwise the one who was fine would be in touch – and it must be something so awful that my brother is incapacitated with grief, leaving Alice to break the news of the disaster to me. By the end of thirty seconds’ worrying, I have arrived at what feels like the only possible conclusion: my parents have died in a car crash.

  My phone rings. It is Alice. Max reaches out to hold my hand across the table as I answer it.

  ‘Hello?’ I say. ‘Alice? Are you OK? Is everything OK?’

  ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘We’re both here.’

  ‘Hi,’ I say.