Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

Seeking to expunge the self-reference, Thomas says, ‘Cultural psychology, nothing personal.’ He shrugs.

  Annie’s relieved that his formality inhibits more candour. Once Thomas admitted to churning inside through long complicated Indian meals and the bustle of family togetherness till his senses dulled. Yet he loves his slender, nervous wife – he just wishes he could always be loyal.

  A disconcerting thought strikes Annie: Thomas would have got on well with Zach – they could have lectured alternately. She pats away the idea. ‘Shelley,’ she says, ‘sloughed off one unit of mother and babes to take on another. He was a gentleman, not a bourgeois. Not lowly enough to feel the imposition and demands of family.’

  Even the surface of family life is worth preserving, says Jane Austen so loudly Fran winces in case the others have heard. But, of course, I was middle class. Also I had a wide sense of family, not for me the pinching unit of mother and child.

  Thomas looks at Annie in surprise; he’s proprietorial about his poet. Fortunately, he has anecdotes prepared for sticky moments with his elders. ‘My friend Humphrey is writing a biography of the hard-boiled egg,’ he begins. ‘My father worked briefly in Ghana helping set up an agricultural institute. He said the hard-boiled egg in the pot was given to the honoured guest.’

  Rachel, whose helpless mother declared when her daughter moved in with her first boyfriend in Greenwich Village, ‘But you can’t boil an egg, darling,’ says, ‘Go on Thomas. We love anecdotes.’

  ‘In long German recitals, audiences ate hardboiled eggs, you had to wade through eggshells to get out of the church.’

  At Mansfield Park, Henry Crawford left eggshells on his plate, but Fanny cared only for the pork bones on her brother’s.

  ‘Quilp,’ says Annie, ‘in The Old Curiosity Shop eats hard-boiled eggs including the shells. He also scoffs gigantic prawns with heads and tails.’

  ‘Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg?’

  ‘In the US,’ says Rachel, ‘hard-boiled used to mean someone who won’t give money to anyone for anything, no way.’

  ‘The sun’s a flaming egg yolk.’

  ‘Go to work on an egg.’

  ‘Enough,’ says Thomas. ‘I’ve delighted you all long enough.’ Jane Austen pulls herself up at that. No one should delight but herself and her Bennet girls.

  ‘We haven’t even considered the hard-boiled egg as missile, the egg-and-spoon race, egg on the face,’ adds Fran. ‘I went with Andrew’ – the name slips out but no one arrests it – ‘to the American Embassy to protest against the Vietnam War. A policeman searching for weapons on the bus confiscated our lunch eggs. I’ve told this story so often it’s got under my skin.’

  ‘Egg under the skin,’ smiles Rachel, ‘might incubate in the warm.’

  ‘Making an angel. No, a feathery woman.’

  ‘They say you can hear the baby turkey squealing inside the egg.’

  ‘The Japanese or Chinese wash their hair with raw egg.’

  ‘Really,’ says Fran, always on the lookout for thrifty hints, ‘doesn’t it scramble in hot water?’

  ‘I dare say you’re unaware,’ Rachel addresses Fran, ‘an Easter egg’s a hidden message or joke in software or computer games.’

  ‘Yup,’ says Annie. She gets up to take out the empty tart plate and arrange her expensive cheeses and guava jelly.

  While she’s away, Fran, having shaken off the slight melancholy that usually follows wine, asks, ‘If you were a bird what would it be? I’m an only child, you know, the deep, dark and pitiful thing. I’d have to be a magpie.’

  ‘I’d be a crow,’ says Annie, returning with her painted board of cheese and jelly.

  ‘You’re right,’ says, Fran warmly, ‘sleek, choleric and clever.’

  Annie laughs, ‘Scavenging too.’

  ‘A coot,’ says Rachel, ‘that’s me.’ She pauses. ‘They bob around.’ She smiles, turning to each, adding as afterthought, ‘They carry their babies on their back.’ She squashes a piece of cheese into some guava jelly, then pops them both into her mouth. ‘Yum.’

  Thomas says, ‘Maybe our chatter sounds to birds like their “singing” does to us, just pulsating sound. No evidence they sit around listening to humans.’

  ‘Some birds must, so they can imitate. Mocking-birds mimic car alarms, telephone rings, squeaking gates. Lyrebirds do camera shutters. Makes a change from same old tweet-tweet.’

  Suddenly Thomas announces, ‘I think I’m a swan.’

  The women burst out laughing. ‘That’s modest,’ says Annie. She glances at his splendid person and thinks, Fair enough.

  He means he has a family and must believe in monogamy and shared duties. Like swans, supposedly. After Annie’s response, he can’t explain without appearing earnest. He cuts off a square of guava jelly, forgets to eat it, and says, ‘Birds are like the sky, a sort of empty page.’

  ‘None of us chose a cuckoo or vulture, a bird with a distinctive home life,’ says Fran. Aware she started the whimsical thread, she asks, ‘Do you think we’re like people in that show we used to watch, remember Annie? Bremner, Bird and Fortune. There was a dinner party where they said things like, “Which religion would you choose to be?” The Irish woman said she was a Catholic and very lapsed, but went to mass for the ritual – and fear for her immortal soul. I liked the man who wanted to be a Muslim so he could do a Fatwa on the person who miss-sold him a car. Aren’t we a bit like that?’

  ‘’Course not,’ says Annie, ‘we’re in Cambridge, that was Islington.’

  ‘I watched it with my mother,’ laughs Thomas. ‘She shooed me out when some woman talked about a seven-hour vaginal douche.’

  After coffee Thomas and Rachel leave together. Through the sitting-room window, Fran spies them lingering on the curb near where Thomas tied his bike. The talk is more than farewell pleasantries: he’s inviting Rachel onto a possible trip to Wales.

  Annie would leave the clearing-up till morning. ‘I’ve got too much Mum in me,’ says Fran. ‘Can’t do it.’

  The kitchen cleaned, both tired and thirsty from alcohol, they delay going to bed. Annie scratches her neck, then removes the amber necklace that’s been chafing her flesh. She places it on the coffee table as if still circling a neck.

  ‘Did you notice Rachel’s discreet diamond ear-rings?’

  Fran smiles. She can’t tell glass from gems. Maybe if she’d seen more of the latter …

  ‘Let’s have another coffee, this time from my beautiful machine.’

  ‘OK, though I won’t sleep. Won’t anyway. Why not?’

  Annie handles the shiny pods and begins to froth noisy milk. A cappuccino isn’t correct after dinner, but now, surely … and such pleasure to make. Fran has no liking for the sudsy confection but enjoys Annie’s pleasure in a new toy. Till she thinks about cleaning the elaborate parts.

  ‘You know I met Thomas a few days back and he’s interested in my Welsh project,’ she says when Annie returns, foam sticking to her upper lip. ‘It’s not really a project.’

  ‘You met Thomas? You didn’t mention it.’

  ‘I forgot. Something intervened,’ lies Fran, who’s kept the news for a mellow moment. ‘He says he might like to go with me to Wales to see where young Shelley stayed – if I’m going anyway,’ she limps.

  Annie looks quizzical.

  ‘If we did go – for Shelley – would you come?’

  ‘Nah,’ says Annie, ‘I get spooked by a lot of greenness.’

  7

  I see myself caught in a reliquary, mutters Jane Austen, surrounded by polished carving.

  Which part of you is in the casket? asks Fran. A bit of bone, a finger, a tooth?

  Tongue, hand. It’s a posthumous feeling: constricted as I am by peacock embellishments. Still, I know life and posterity are mere anterooms.

  Mum had a horror of resurrection in either place.

  A lapsed Baptist, Fran keeps other thoughts to herself. Jane Austen is a Believer like Agafia. Though nowadays the Church of England ba
rely counts, it’s still some distance from secular relativism. Did Jane Austen and Agafia ever doubt?

  Once as a child Fran watched faith die, right before her eyes. The minister had a house, a car and a (small) flock from the chapel, all depending on belief in the pentecostal flame. In late middle age, how would he learn another trade? He went on preaching.

  Had it really happened in so counter-damascene a way? Baptists love a drama: factor that in. Later, the minister was accused of ‘backsliding’. Fran imagined him gliding on his rump down the slippery slope towards the lake of perdition, arms folded.

  She doesn’t often mention her lax sectarian past to Jane Austen. Despite a generous gesture towards evangelicals in a letter, the Author never cared for Nonconformists. At heart she was a traditionalist, a thoughtful, discerning, critical traditionalist.

  Are no probabilities to be accepted, merely because they are not certainties?

  What are Annie’s inherited beliefs? Marx and (fallen) Uncle Joe rather than the Torah – is that the Jewish book? (Fran’s embarrassingly ignorant) – were the deities of her world. They don’t appear especially damaging. Annie complains of casual anti-Semitism. Fran’s unconvinced. She can be acidic, too sure of her opinions though hedged with qualifiers – qualifiers, not doubts. She’s not always endearing. She has useful acquaintances, few intimates.

  Fran compares herself with her ‘best friend’. (How girlish the term! Perhaps this too is a legacy of the only-child syndrome, the impossibility of dealing with more than one consciousness at a time. Contrary too: such friendship at the end, not the formative beginning of life.) She and Annie may be too judgemental, too apt to dismiss what doesn’t conform to their standards. They might say with Elizabeth Bennet: there are few people in the world whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well.

  Even as she slaps the quotation on them both, Fran finds it true only of Annie. She feels a rush of warmth from head to loins as she contemplates her friend’s buoyant self-regard.

  No damping down excitement about the proposed trip. Worry too. So long since Fran’s been away in close company. Would Thomas and Rachel want her had they known Annie might refuse? But would they be going at all if she hadn’t been encouraging? Shelley’s time in Elan Valley was brief, the poems he wrote there aren’t the masterpieces of his mature years. Yet Thomas likes this raw early stuff: it breathes of wild land and ideas.

  No accounting, thinks Fran gratefully.

  Thomas will travel to Wales in his roomy four-wheel drive – traded up with his father-in-law’s money and insistence. The two women will go by train to Llandrindod: its station (according to Fran) left standing after Beeching’s cull. Rachel has quality waterproof gear for feet and head and expects to be dry despite having, with initial disbelief, consulted the BBC weather for mid-Wales. She still hopes Annie will come.

  ‘Annie’s chickened out,’ says Fran. ‘She draws the line at hostelries without ensuites. She’ll keep her mobile phone on. So,’ she adds, ‘you and I will take our first outing together. Our friendship has been quick.’ She intends a compliment, then fears her words sound anxious. ‘Thomas plans to join us in Rhayader. You two can burble on about Shelley. We’ll see his house under the water. It’ll interest him though he poohpoohs biography.’

  Fran’s smile makes Rachel uneasy: she’s trying to humour me.

  ‘We must be nice to him since he’s young and keen. As for me, I want to see my homeland in company.’

  ‘We’ve got a TV series called Homeland,’ says Rachel. ‘Fascist sort of term.’

  This, thinks Fran, is the kind of verbal sloppiness Jane Austen would mock.

  Your ‘nice’ is no improvement, hisses the Author. Recollect my Henry Tilney rebuking young Catherine Morland for precisely such use.

  From Fran’s expression, Rachel assumes she’s embarrassed at revealing patriotism. They don’t haul flags up their garden poles, but Brits mistakenly believe they cover their feelings in irony. Better the good old jamboree of 4th July with ticker-tape parades, cheerleaders and fireworks. Less sentimental.

  ‘We’ll go from Rhayader to Elan Valley,’ says Fran. ‘We can take notes to show we’re not tourists.’

  Fran visualises herself, Rachel and Thomas in his big car whizzing and honking like Toad in The Wind in the Willows down the narrow hill street travelling past the Rhayader workhouse, the chapels, the town clock, Dad’s first shop, the rundown manse once inhabited by her grandfather, out to the wild places, to Elan and Claerwen valleys, everyone interested in the many facts she conveys, fascinated by her stories.

  What really pulls her towards the unlikely trip? Blood memory, Percy Shelley, Andrew? All or none?

  Some years back, calculating her pension after an especially unrewarding day filling in forms explaining – or pleading – to the masters of FE how her attention to Great Expectations might provide ‘functional skills’ for all levels of ability – she’d thought of upping stakes and finding a cottage near the drab little Welsh town. Being born in a place makes it magic: everyone knows it, even governments.

  To live near Rhayader is the next best thing to settling on Vesuvius or Stromboli: if an ageing stone dam collapses, there’ll be a deluge. Failing that, the town may quietly slide into the river.

  ‘Who’d be looking?’ asks Rachel

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who’d think us tourists?’

  Fran pauses, having mislaid the remark. ‘Other tourists I suppose.’

  ‘You said the place was empty.’

  Fran shrugs, preoccupied with the conundrum as to whether Jane Austen will be coming.

  Brother Henry said she was ‘enamoured’ by William Gilpin and his ideas of picturesque beauty. Like the Lake District, Wales inspired this eighteenth-century guru. Sadly, the charming Henry lacked his genius sister’s withering irony: on occasion, Gilpin and his rules are ridiculous.

  Henry Tilney again – educating Catherine into ignoring the entire city of Bath while they practise the picturesque on Beechen Cliff. As a little girl, Jane composes ‘Tour Through Wales’. Her sprightly heroine dashes through the principality noting very little – then hops home from Hereford.

  Jane Austen may not come.

  Fran visits the Cambridge Library to consult the Radnorshire Transactions for signs of Shelley in Elan Valley. Transfixed by the new layout, she stares through a high window on readers in the tearoom. She sees a girl in 1940s ginger ringlets holding her pale-blue phone with little hands that peek like ferrets from the sleeves of a weedy green jumper. At the same table under a corona of grey tangled hair, a man with squashed face sips coffee ruminatively. A fat girl with dark glasses and strands of wheat hair straying across her forehead sits alone. At a table by the wall an old man in a black suit brings his unspectacled eyes within inches of spidery notes. Swishing past him a confident Chinese girl lets the door shut jerkily in the face of a monkish, flabby jawed man; he’s unperturbed, used to rudeness. Round the water fountain the young congregate to meet and hydrate.

  Fran’s enjoying but not profiting from her ‘research’. She’s drawn aside by the 1948 issue of the Radnorshire Transactions, which laments that the 2/6 charged per copy nowhere near covers printing in post-war times. The county should decide on a coat of arms: might it include both the Welsh pre-Conquest hero, tenth-century Elystan Glodrhydd, ruling his tribe on this patch of land, as well as the Norman Mortimers?

  Unlike Annie, Fran’s unused to sitting without popping up to turn off a leaking tap, fiddle with a lamp or pinch up a fallen crumb. She fidgets.

  Two mornings pass – largely wasted if Shelley’s the goal and ‘research’ more than a mental exercise-bike. Excepting one mention, the Transactions are silent on the Poet in Elan Valley. She does however find material on the region’s houses – dismaying Jane Austen, who correctly anticipates its use.

  Down a side street Rachel and Fran meet in an upstairs coffee shop. They sit uncomfortably on wooden benches, Rachel’s head almost touching the
ceiling’s slope. The coffee’s no better and the toilets worse than in the mirrored café chains but, like many New Yorkers, Rachel believes in local business, however cramped. She waits politely.

  Fran coughs and drums her fingers on the pad she used in the Library. It remains unopened on the table. ‘We can hire a car in Llandrindod and drive to Rhayader. Thomas has to carry his family somewhere before coming on. Rhayader used to have a station. It was opened in 1864 nearby in Cwmdauddwr.’ Rachel raises her sculptured eyebrows at the outlandish name but stays mum. ‘The line took five years to build over moorland and swamp, then was closed in 1962. Dismantled in months.’

  To Fran’s relief, Rachel nods. Not because a railway line interests her, but she remembers Annie telling her that, though Fran has held teaching jobs, they’d not dampened a didactic urge. She’s warned Rachel, and they’ve laughed. Didacticism’s a no-no in creative writing.

  As for Annie, she aims for the Johnsonian mode: teaching known truths in alluring manner.

  We all fancy ourselves as teachers, whispers Jane Austen, but can only teach what’s not worth knowing.

  In for a penny, in for a pound, thinks Rachel in the local lingo. She’s of a mood to humour all of them. She is, she thinks, starting to fall in love with this ludicrous uptight country, this overstuffed island quaintly called the United Kingdom. If this is unity, what’s disarray?

  ‘We could look round Llandrindod before going on?’ Fran suggests nervously. ‘Do you want to know about it?’

  ‘How to get my tongue round the first syllable, I guess,’ says Rachel.

  ‘No need,’ says Fran. ‘It’s anglicised.’

  As Fran begins on the history of the chalybeate springs of Llandrindod, with details of the sulphur smell and the ailments cured, Rachel realises she should have drawn the line earlier. Fran is saying, ‘William Gilpin wrote of the “sulphureous springs of Llanydrindod”; he didn’t complain about the foul-egg taste.’

  Jane Austen falls asleep. Rude considering that, despite mocking credulous cure-seekers in Sanditon, she herself took the waters at Cheltenham during her long process of dying. She opens one eye, There’s an art to recording boring talk without boring your reader. Mrs Elton, Miss Bates, Sir Edward Denham of Sanditon. She re-closes the eye.