by Nell Stevens
You were going to America.
The journey reminded you, of course, of your voyage to Rome all those years ago, the succession of sunrises and sunsets, the patterns of colours playing on the water at night, the early morning stillness. You had been with your girls, then, and hadn’t known, as you did this time, that Mr Norton was waiting on the other side. As you set off from Marseille, gliding past the Château d’If, you had not known that your life was about to change.
This time around, you were alone. Your girls had all grown up. You were a solo voyager to the New World, and you were going to see your old, dear friend, with whom you were – had always been – in love.
For the thousandth time, you tried to imagine America. You recalled the photographs you had seen of its houses and cities, the stories you’d read of its forests. You took out Mr Norton’s letters and read the descriptions of his home in Boston, his garden, his study, words and images that had made you ache with longing when you had first read them, and made you ache still. You were going to see them with your own eyes.
The wind grasped the last page of an old letter from your hand and blew it out of reach, above the deck and then out, over the ocean. You watched it flap and flutter above the water, then get caught in a wave and sucked under.
The letters you had sent, one after another, across the Atlantic to Mr Norton, would all be waiting for you in his house in Massachusetts. The words you wrote were no longer replacements for you, only precursors.
Day after day, night after night, your ship crept around the curve of the globe. Above you the clouds and sun and moon shifted around each other in the sky. Beneath you were the carcasses of ships and people who had sailed before you and failed to stay afloat. Somewhere down there was the page of Mr Norton’s letter that had fluttered away from you into the water. Somewhere was the skeleton of Margaret Fuller, the American journalist who had lived in Rome and drowned in 1850 with her husband and baby. Nearby would be the vast statue of John Calhoun that Hiram Powers had tried to send to America on the same ship, and which had gone down along with every other passenger on board. There were countless lives and stories down there on the ocean bed. Swathed in seaweed, John Calhoun’s marble face was staring up at you.
You kept your mind on the surface of the water, and on the world ahead. The first sign of land on the horizon was, the captain said, Newfoundland, and even the name of it made your heart sing. The ship moved south. Nova Scotia. Maine. Small green islands pushed up through the water near the coast, more vibrant and solid, you thought, than any English version you had ever seen. The Old World had nothing at all on this bright new continent where, one morning, after two weeks at sea, a cry on deck summoned you up to look out at a broad new city, a harbour flecked with white-sailed boats, and a crowd of people waiting on the shore to greet the ship.
New York, the passengers around you murmured, and you said it to yourself: ‘New York.’ New life, new chapter, new opportunity, new world. New York.
There was a crush of porters and hustlers and tradesmen and newspaper-sellers as you disembarked the ship, and shouting all around, and you craned your neck to look over the heads of the rabble, searching for that one familiar face, which you had sailed for weeks to find. And then, at last, there it was. He was there, waiting for you with a bunch of violets in one hand, as though no time at all had passed since your breakfasts at Casa Cabrale, as though nothing had changed.
His face amongst the others in the crowd was hopeful, smiling, sunlit, looking just as you first saw it.
Thanks—
To Rebecca Carter, my agent at Janklow & Nesbit, for telling me to write this book when it was just a passing thought; for her ability to turn big problems into small ones, and small ones into thin air; for friendship.
To Sophie Jonathan, who is sharp and generous, who finds in my words the story they were meant to be, and without whom I’d never get outed on Upper Street.
To Kris Puopolo for perfectly worded advice, infectious zeal, seeing the best in my writing and being infinitely tactful about the worst.
To Lynn Henry for support, enthusiasm and good ideas.
To Emma Parry at Janklow & Nesbit in New York, whose brilliance is always palpable from this side of the Atlantic.
To the many people at Picador in the UK, Doubleday in the US, and Knopf in Canada, including Gillian Fitzgerald-Kelly, Justine Anweiler, Daniel Meyer and many others, who have transformed fragmented word documents on my laptop into books you can hold.
To Leslie Epstein for a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
To my Ph.D. supervisor at King’s College London, the staff at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for supporting me during the strange years of my Ph.D.
To Gabrielle Mearns for hospital visits, night-time phone calls and Italian days.
To Amanda Walker, Claudia Gray and Grace Shortland, for helping me out from under the coffee table.
To Laura Marris for steadfastness, margaritas, clarity and poetry.
To Nick Stone for bagels on the Highline and a summer in New York.
To Lena Dunham for support and solidarity.
To Margaret and Richard for continuing to parent me long after any of us could have imagined it would be necessary.
To Simon and Emily for thinking about things so clearly and so wisely.
To the man who is like and not like Max in this story, for his generosity, integrity, graciousness and courage.
To Eley Williams, plot twist & plot twister.
And, finally, to you, Mrs Gaskell, my great friend.
NELL STEVENS lives in London where she teaches Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has a Ph.D. in Victorian literature from King’s College London, and an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. She is the author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me.
Also by Nell Stevens
Bleaker House
First published 2018 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2018 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-6819-3
Copyright © Nell Stevens 2018
COVER DESIGN BY JUSTINE ANWEILER, PICADOR ART DEPARTMENT
COVER IMAGES; ‘AT HOME: A PORTRAIT’, 1872, BY WALTER CRANE. LEEDS MUSEUMS AND ART GALLERIES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Author Photograph by Mat Smith
The right of Nell Stevens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Permissions Acknowledgements
An extract from ‘Something Amazing Just Happened’ by Ted Berrigan appears here with permission from University of California Press Books; Ted Berrigan, The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan, University of California Press Books, 2011. Gail Mazur, ‘Michelangelo: To Giovanni Da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel (by Michelangelo Buonarroti)’ from Zeppo’s First Wife. Copyright © 2005 by Gail Mazur. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. Source: They Can’t Take That Away from Me (The University of Chicago Press, 2001). An extract from ‘Poet’s Work’ by Lorine Niedecker appears here with permission from University of California Press Books; Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works, University of California Press Books, 2004. Poems by William Story are reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. ‘The Nineteenth Century and After’ by W. B. Yeats appears in its entirety here. Grateful acknowledgement is made to United Agents on behalf of Caitríona Yeats.
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