Mrs Gaskell and Me

by Nell Stevens

  As the rooms filled and the volume of their combined conversations rose, William moved between circles, sampling and moving on, lifting titbits from one to drop into another. There were murmurings about Auguste Rodin, a French sculptor who had been in Italy a few years before, but was now in Paris, showing a work entitled The Age of Bronze.

  ‘There is something new in it,’ Miss Lewis said. ‘It is so entirely true to life, and yet, unlike anything ever seen before.’

  ‘It’s a low type of art,’ countered William, who had seen a photograph of the statue in the newspaper. ‘The fellow has talent, but will never come to much unless he elevates his mind. There is so little to be gained in mere expressiveness. He wants a nobler subject.’

  Another group was discussing a new story by Henry James entitled Daisy Miller, which had appeared that summer in the Cornhill Magazine.

  ‘It is not so brilliant as Roderick Hudson,’ said a young woman, a friend of Edith. ‘I did not see that she really had to die at the end.’

  ‘Oh, she absolutely had to die,’ said Edith, looking wry. ‘We could not possibly allow such an improper young lady to go unpunished.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, you have both spoiled the ending,’ said Miss Hosmer. ‘I have only just reached the part where they get to Rome.’ She looked away for a moment, and her expression softened. ‘Oh, look,’ she said. ‘Mr Browning has come.’ And there, on the other side of the room, was William’s old friend, aged, but not beyond recognition, striding towards them and reaching out a hand to shake his.

  ‘Here you are,’ said Robert. ‘Here you still are.’

  ‘Here we still are,’ said William. ‘All of us who are left.’

  Miss Hosmer took Robert’s hand and murmured, ‘Ah, I’ve missed this ugly paw,’ and then the three of them stood, looking about them, saying nothing for a long while.

  William thought of breaking their silence with something along the lines of, ‘It’s just like old times,’ but in truth it was not like the old times. There were too many absent friends, too many who had left or died, and they who remained were too old to dance, or to put on the plays they once had performed. The younger generation was singing now.

  When the last guest had left, William stared at the apartment, empty, silent, Emelyn dozing in a chair by the fire. Edith and her husband had already gone to bed. Waldo was smoking at the window, looking down at the courtyard where the servants were extinguishing lamps. The fountain folded over and over itself, glittering until the last light went out.

  ‘Did you have a good time, Father?’ said Waldo, turning.

  Beside him, William looked out at the dark, ruined city, and put a hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘For years and years,’ he said.

  2016

  Accoutrements of womanhood: three observations

  One: An Engagement Ring

  I see them on the tube, these women. My eyes slide to the fourth fingers of their left hands, where diamonds sit against their skin, leering at me as they catch the light. I try to imagine their lives, which seem, from the safe distance of the other side of the carriage, somehow defined by this thing they have decided to do. I know nothing else about them. They are going to get married. That is all. They are the heroines of their own love stories. Nothing has gone wrong for them yet.

  Depending on my mood, my own unchosen, undecorated hands seem either childish and embarrassing, or brave, alternative, independent, as I fold and unfold them in my lap.

  Two: A Baby on Board

  When the woman has collected not only her engagement ring, but also, next level up, the secondary gold band, she is ready to have a ‘Baby on Board’ badge pinned to the lapel of her coat. For this, she is either awarded a seat on the tube, or a wall of eyes turned the other way, pretending not to have noticed her.

  Even more than I stare at diamond rings, I stare at the rounded stomachs of pregnant women.

  I have reached a state of more-or-less relaxed ambivalence about marriage. I am embarrassed and annoyed by its excesses and its smugness, envious of its securities. But children, the possibility, pros and cons of them, preoccupy me. If Max and I had stuck to our original timeline, we’d be living together in the same country and the idea of creating a new human would not seem as distant, outlandish, impossible, as it does to me now.

  I am thirty. I am single. I am no longer heartbroken, but still, the idea of being with someone who is not Max feels impossible. The idea of being with someone who is Max is clearly impossible. I order an information pack from a sperm bank and when it arrives in the post, I leaf through it over a glass of wine and try to imagine what it would be like to have a child without the help of someone else.

  I ask my mother about it. ‘Aren’t you worried that it will affect your writing?’ she says. ‘I’m not sure you’d be able to write, with a baby to care for.’

  This does not seem positive, but it is also, I hope, not necessarily true. I turn to Louise for a second opinion. She is nine months pregnant, large, uncomfortable and very ready to discuss children with me. ‘Would you have the baby if you weren’t with Frank?’ I ask. ‘Would you have the baby by yourself?’

  She pauses to think about it, stroking her stomach as though, like a crystal ball, it might reveal the answer. ‘You know, I really don’t think I would,’ she says after a while, and then, seeing that I am crestfallen, ‘but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Maybe it would be fine.’

  Three: A Baby

  On the day I am due to submit my completed Ph.D. thesis, the pain in my right side returns so intensely that I can’t move. I kneel on all fours on the floor and rock back and forth and breathe noisily as though I’m in labour. In a panic, I call Louise, who arrives with her newborn son, Zachary, in a sling and administers painkillers to me. Later, when I am calmer, she puts the baby next to the two bound copies of my thesis, takes a photo and sends it to Izra and Holly with the caption ‘some of the things we made this year’. Then she takes the thesis to the exams office at King’s on my behalf.

  By the time she texts to reassure me that she got it in on time, the pain has vanished again. ‘I didn’t tell them I wasn’t you. I just handed it over with the paperwork. They said congratulations on finishing,’ she writes, ‘especially with a new baby.’

  2016

  Critic

  Two months after Louise and Zach submitted my thesis on my behalf, and two weeks before my viva is due to take place, the pain in my right side returns yet again. There was a brief respite when things seemed to be getting better; I still needed to pee all the time, and my back had started aching, which I attributed to carrying an increasingly heavy Zach around, but at least the pain was gone. Then, one Saturday morning at 4 a.m., I wake myself up screaming.

  I try to reposition myself in the bed, to find a way of lying that lessens the pain. I take paracetamol, and then ibuprofen, and then aspirin. Still, it feels as though something is breaking inside me, and I can’t keep myself from yelling with each exhale. I am back on the floor, rocking like a disturbed zoo animal, and when I call my parents to ask for advice, I have to explain what is going on in short bursts, between howls.

  ‘I think you need to go to hospital,’ my mother says, at which point it seems very obvious that I do. I call the out-of-hours doctor, who listens to my alternating whimperings and shrieks, and sends an ambulance.

  I am still in my pyjamas, and in the half-hour before the paramedics arrive, I undertake what, in my current state, is a colossal challenge: I put on a bra. Every stage of this process is excruciating and I stop at several points to retch: lifting my top over my head to take it off; reaching up to my underwear drawer; sliding my arms through the straps; twisting my hands behind my back to hook the clasp. By the time my doorbell rings, I am half delirious with pain and have thrown up on my bedroom floor, but I am, triumphantly, wearing underwear.

  I am strapped to a trolley and loaded into an ambulance, still yelling so loudly that my neighbours come to their windows and stare. My la
st glimpse of the street as the doors close behind me is of curious, craning faces. Once we set off, the paramedics give me small doses of morphine, which don’t stop the pain, but dim it for a few minutes at a time. We arrive at King’s College Hospital. A brief glimpse of the sky overhead as I’m wheeled inside. A corridor. Suddenly the paramedics aren’t here any more, and the painkillers have worn off, and I am yelling again, and someone says, ‘Who is dealing with this?’ A small white room. A nurse asking me what I’ve taken. I say I don’t know. I give her my arm and she swabs it with alcohol: cold, rough against my skin. A needle.

  ‘I’m giving you morphine, OK?’ she says.

  ‘A lot?’ I ask.

  ‘A lot,’ she says, and already I can feel it taking effect, wrapping itself around me like insulation. I can still feel the pain, but I am detached from it, far away from myself – from the self that is lying on the trolley in the white room, no longer yelling but whimpering and mumbling at the ceiling. I lose any sense of time, and instead I am content to exist in my morphine-dream, in which a person like me is in pain, a person for whom I have a great deal of sympathy, but who is separate and beyond my control.

  At some point, a doctor arrives, and prods my stomach, and asks me to rate the pain out of ten.

  ‘It is a ten when I am there,’ I say.

  ‘When you’re there?’

  ‘I’m not there right now.’

  ‘OK.’

  Later, a doctor appears with a medical student. ‘We’re just going to take a look at your tummy. Is that all right?’ She directs the young man to examine me.

  He is nervous and uncertain. ‘Should I expose the patient?’ he says, to her, and she says, ‘Well, ask the patient.’

  ‘May I expose you now?’ he says, and I agree contentedly to let him lift my shirt up, because I am not there, and in any case, I am wearing a bra underneath it. His cold fingers prod my ribs, my diaphragm and then hit the site of the pain. For a brief moment, I come back to myself enough to yell. ‘Does that hurt?’ he asks. ‘How much out of ten?’

  Later still, my father is there, staring into my pupils. I tell him I’ve had morphine and he says, ‘Yes, I can see you have.’

  I fall asleep, and when I am next awake I hear my father talking to a man. ‘There are no beds,’ the man is saying. And at some point even later – my father says it is still Saturday – I am wheeled on my trolley into a lift, and then along some corridors, and then into a small room, past another woman on another trolley, and left there.

  ‘We think it’s your appendix,’ a doctor says, ‘but we need to send you for a scan. When was the last time you ate?’ he asks.

  ‘Yesterday,’ I say.

  ‘And drank?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘We’ll have your scan done, and then get you into surgery as soon as we can.’

  But the scan is not done. Someone arrives and reports that it cannot be done at the weekend; there is nobody who will do it. I hear a whispered, irritated conversation between two voices on the other side of a curtain.

  ‘We have to operate without the scan.’

  ‘We can’t operate without the scan.’

  I lie on the trolley for three days. They are always just about to operate, which means I can’t have food or drink, but then, at the last minute, there is always a reason why they can’t. At one point on the Sunday evening, they decide they really are about to take me to theatre and just need to do some blood tests before I go, but discover somebody forgot to replace my drip that morning, and I am so dehydrated that the doctor can’t find a vein.

  By Monday, I am unsure where I am. My parents and friends have come in and out, and each time I open my eyes I am not sure who will be there. It is for this reason that when I look up to see Mrs Gaskell perched at the end of my trolley, I am not really surprised. She is one of many visitors, real or otherwise.

  ‘Mrs Gaskell?’ I say.

  ‘Look at you,’ she says. ‘Just look at you. What a state.’

  ‘You really need to work on your trolleyside manner,’ I say.

  ‘And you really need to brush your hair.’

  ‘I wrote about you,’ I tell her. ‘I wrote all about you in Rome.’

  Her face softens then, and she says, as I knew she would, because, of course, she is in my head and I am making it all up, ‘It was the tip-top point of my life.’

  When I come round from the surgery I am shivering. I can’t stop. My teeth are chattering and I am shaking so hard that the side of the trolley is jangling against the drip stand. A nurse brings a tube that blows hot air under the covers, and it feels almost like having the morphine again: a cocooning relief. I let my head fall back. Gradually, the trembling subsides.

  ‘Did it go OK?’ I ask the woman who is standing by my pillow. ‘Did they take out my appendix?’

  ‘The doctor will come and speak to you soon,’ she says, and I know at once that something is wrong, from the way she won’t meet my eye, from the way she doesn’t say, as I overhear someone telling the patient on the other side of the curtain, ‘Everything went well. It was all fine.’

  ‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘Please can you tell me what happened?’

  I wait all night and half of the next day to find out. Then a consultant comes round with my file, and explains that the cause of the pain was not, in fact, my appendix, but my right ovary, which had swollen to the size of a grapefruit and twisted five times on the fallopian tube.

  ‘Have you noticed any other symptoms recently? Frequent urination? Back pain?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, both of those things.’

  ‘That’s fairly typical if you have an ovary the size of a grapefruit,’ she says.

  There seems to me nothing typical at all about having an ovary the size of a grapefruit. ‘How do we fix it?’ I ask. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘We had to take it out,’ the consultant says. ‘It was dead. It was gangrenous. There was no viable tissue left.’

  ‘You took out my ovary?’

  I think I might cry – I want to cry – but at that moment, my entire torso seizes up with pain and all I can do is lie there, paralysed, trying not to breathe. This ‘discomfort’, the doctor says, is normal after the kind of surgery I’ve had, and will pass. I wait. She waits. And then it does pass, and the tears come.

  ‘I still have one left?’ I ask, and she says, yes, I do, and that as far as they know it is healthy, but that, because I have all my eggs in one basket, it would be wise to consider, as a matter of some urgency, my ‘fertility options’.

  ‘A grapefruit,’ I tell Mrs Gaskell, who is back, standing beside my trolley, close enough this time that I can really scrutinize her. ‘A grapefruit. I did not see that coming.’

  ‘Nor did I,’ she says.

  Everything about her is strange: her clothes, the cut of them and the way they sit around her body; the shape of her waist and bust, sculpted with stays; the way she smells, musty and sweat-tinged.

  ‘I must seem so bizarre to you,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, casting her eyes over the hair I already know she finds unacceptably messy, over the hospital gown, which is still blood-stained from the surgery; nobody has come to change it yet.

  ‘I’m a single woman with a single ovary,’ I tell her. ‘I’m thirty years old. I have to consider my fertility options as a matter of some urgency.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Max is gone. My right ovary is gone. Should I just have a baby by myself, Mrs Gaskell? Is that the right thing to do?’

  ‘I think an unmarried life may be to the full as happy, in process of time, but I think there is a time of trial to be gone through with women, who naturally yearn after children,’ says Mrs Gaskell. I have heard this from her before, in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton.

  ‘That’s not true any more, though,’ I tell her. ‘Unmarried doesn’t have to mean childless. What I’m saying is, should I do this alone? Should I use a sperm donor, and h
ave a baby, alone?’

  There is no way Mrs Gaskell can comprehend the question I am asking. From where she sits, beside my trolley, and yet still, somehow, deep inside the nineteenth century, there is no such thing as sperm donation, there is no such thing as a baby without a man.

  My gynaecological situation, it occurs to me now, is a perfect metaphor for my position on reproduction. Half of me, the left ovary, is primed and ready to go: I want to have a baby; I have always imagined that I would eventually be a mother, although until recently I have also assumed that Max would be part of the process; I am ready, nonetheless, for that ‘eventually’ to be now. The other half of me, the right ovary, is a twisted, agitated mess that has contemplated the same questions – motherhood, single or otherwise – and reached a different conclusion; has not yet adjusted to the breakup, or the recalibration of my future that it prompted; is convinced that having a baby alone will mean the end of my career; is in pain.

  Perhaps I have said all this aloud, because Mrs Gaskell murmurs, ‘The right ovary isn’t there any more. The right ovary died. It’s gone.’

  The right ovary is gone.

  ‘What would you do, Mrs Gaskell? If you were doing it all over again, would you marry Mr Gaskell, and have children? Would you do it, looking back, knowing what you know now?’

  She sits down in the chair by the window, and folds her hands in her lap. ‘All I wanted was to tell stories,’ she says. ‘I was a writer. I would have been a writer no matter what had happened, Mr Gaskell or not, Marianne or not, Meta or not. It was as unchangeable as any solid fact – as unchangeable as Mr Gaskell’s hatred of foreign food, as unchangeable as factory smoke over Plymouth Grove, as unchangeable as a dead ovary.’