by Janet Todd
Rachel’s gear looks expensive – though Fran can’t actually tell: could be Primark for all she knows. If so, is Rachel rich? The way she claimed that second-best room in the B&B – as a bit of curious slumming – suggests she might be.
The choice to walk wasn’t only about memory. Last night Fran had been inhibited by sharing a toilet on the lower landing. Now she fears what John Betjeman calls ‘compulsory constipation’, that toll on the worried. Walking might be laxative.
A poor idea, she notes, when it does its work. At her leaving drinks in Norwich there’d been a round of tips for retirement. A sozzled colleague offered: ‘Never trust a fart.’ She grins recalling the advice – and the colleague, with whom she’d once had a post-drinks fumble. Lonesome cowboys farting over baked-beancans, he’d laughed immoderately.
Just as well Rachel’s off in front.
As they approach the reservoirs, the country stretches out like a much-washed Fair Isle jumper: green, purple and tawny, colours muted and smudged, edges fraying, lines between fields and patches vague and muffled; tussocks like pilling wool. Fran catches Rachel to share the image.
Rachel has never seen or worn a Fair Isle jumper in her life; she smiles at the quaint word ‘jumper’. Then, intending to please, says ‘magical’ – a term rather new to her but part of her acclimatising. She looks at stunted thorn and bog cotton, notes tree roots dangling from rocks, water dripping from their hairs.
They make no effort at further chat as they trudge along together. The silence leaves Fran to consider how very unprepossessing Jane Austen must find Shelley. Or is she fascinated by the type – at least in her butterfly time? What is Mr Darcy in those early chapters?
They’ve had this argument, time and time again. (You made him the heartthrob with your films. My business is with girls.
Without him you’d be another George Eliot or Fanny Burney. Once you were little more than a high-brow niche interest.
No need to repeat the exchange: Jane Austen always has the edge.)
Thomas passes in his Land Rover, waves and goes on to their meeting place.
By the time they reach him he’s unloaded his mountain bike and is dressed for serious moving – a bit of a peacock in his Lycra, yellow cape and normcore. He sits on the car seat, door open, tapping into his small laptop. Two sheep prod his shin, begging for biscuits and sandwich crusts.
‘There’s something moving and good in Shelley, whatever his errors with women,’ he says.
‘Is that what you’re writing?’
‘Some. I do a weekly blog.’
‘Really. How?’
‘Willpower.’
‘You could mention Gilpin,’ suggests Fran. ‘He was here before the flooding.’
Thomas smiles, closes, then pushes his laptop under blankets on the car’s backseat. Getting up, he smooths his fingers along the lines of his intricate bike. ‘I’ll meet you by the side of the first dam. Go in comfort.’
‘Huggy hygge,’ says Fran, mistaking its meaning.
I rarely mention a ‘hug’, remarks Jane Austen. ’Tis an ugly word. Mr Price gives a cordial hug to his daughter Fanny, home from Mansfield Park, then ignores her. From this you discern there’s no enthusiasm and warmth in my hugs; so, despite my marketability in most aspects of life – as I’m told – my hugs cannot be commercialised.
‘Love that you’re here,’ exclaims Fran.
‘Of course,’ says Rachel. She’s touched by the warmth Fran’s showing towards her.
10
Thomas returns glowing from exercise, rain or sweat on his forehead.
They’re assembled. Time to hear of Shelley, the boy Percy when he was The Shelley, before feminism topsy-turvied everything. (No problem with the occasional flash forward in this plot – we know the ending.)
I made no apologies for intrusion in my own voice, remarks Jane Austen. One does not have to be inscrutable. Even an out-of-body narrator has a body, don’t you know?
A snigger somewhere, probably from Rachel, who’s aware how difficult it is to intrude information in dialogue and action. Clumsy in a short story. Yet she knows more of the nitty-gritty of Shelley’s life than the others.
No problem, Annie would shrug, but couldn’t you put it in a footnote?
Footnotes are seldom read except by those wishing to poach them.
Jane Austen is amused. I signed off with information, but only after I’d spun my masterly dialogues. I showed Mrs Bennet to be incorrigible before stating it.
So why do both? pouts Fran.
To avoid the possibility of narrative failure, explains the Author, quietly exasperated. Never underestimate the reader’s inattention.
‘Go on, Rachel,’ says Fran.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter was not the first pretty sixteen-year-old he’d fancied. Like a vampire he hungered for young female blood, his thin tall white frame needing to be electrified – by spirit, he would say. Adrenalin, laudanum, girl children.
Thomas grins at the hyperbole. Something theatrical about Rachel.
He was born in Field Place in Horsham, Sussex, a snug mansion with no view, a soft and lovely womb blessed by the Established Church. Along with a coat of arms and nannies, what could be more secure? No wonder he sneers at good fortune, pretends in after years he has no family or home.
Like other little boys, he does nature, trapping moths, bats and spiders. In adolescence he thinks himself a farmer in waiting, knowing of land and chemicals in soil – how wrong is Elan Valley for his purpose! – but disliking dirt on his shoes and fine clothes. For he’s a dandy though careless – needing his shooting jacket and dancing gloves.
At Eton he suffers, dumped from paradise into this camp of class and cruelty, though many testify he brawls with the best when in bad temper.
‘Nothing like discomfort after comfort to spawn a poet,’ interrupts Fran. She knows a raconteur needs applause.
But with a kindly tutor he reads of ideal worlds. He becomes enthralled by William Godwin, anarchist philosopher of utopia. He can’t get enough of Political Justice. It preaches against all hierarchies – and marriage.
As Rachel pauses, Thomas walks a little way off waving his mobile phone in the air. As if divine rays might catch and enchant it or wind transform it into an aeolian harp tinkling podcasts and Guardian updates.
‘I did warn you a signal was unlikely,’ says Fran.
‘You said it was erratic.’
‘A fudge to get you here.’
He returns to the tale. ‘Shelley’s mind was already full of forests and precipices. He was preparing himself for wilder places than Southern England.’
‘You mean earthly ones, I hope, Thomas.’
‘Not really. He responds deeply to the physical world in all its stickiness, but he really longs for the immaterial, for pure air and water.’
‘I guess we’re all stuck in physical moments,’ says Rachel.
‘I wish I weren’t,’ moans Fran, taking out her handkerchief to wipe her drizzle-muted spectacles. Her fingers are coarsened by the mucousy liquid soap in the B&B, its coagulated content hanging from the spout: they itch, reminding her of childhood chilblains. She feels the pinching of her black lace-up shoes.
It’s important, says Jane Austen, to be appropriately shod. Unless you think with William Cowper, one of my favourite poets,
When Winter soaks the fields, and female feet,
Too weak to struggle with tenacious clay,
Or ford the rivulets, are best at home.
You’ll remember Mrs John Knightley’s shoes were too thin for the season and my Marianne Dashwood imprudently sat in wet footwear.
Rachel slopes off, a little irritated by Fran’s interrupting. Thomas smiles, waiting for her to return. He shifts his feet and looks sideways at his taut calves. He’s champing at the bit like a thoroughbred racehorse. The mist covers his way: soon he’ll cycle again into nothing. He and Shelley.
If she ignores her friends, Fran could fancy herself back
here visiting her Rhayader aunt for Christmas. Frost would mute the ground making tufts of marsh grass stand up like islands in a still lagoon. To a bookish child in the throes of puberty, mist seemed then like the miasma in Dracula, a malaria or plague moving silently – or shimmering a gentle blessing on the high fields. Shelley?
Puberty is slushy as well as confused.
She looks at Thomas. Old-fashioned in a way, but also greedy for experience. When Rachel comes back, she says, ‘May I tell you both just one story. Mum told it me.’
Fran hasn’t mentioned a mother before, just a grim granddad. Rachel’s fictional ears perk up. Always aware this drably dressed woman is his admired Annie’s close friend, Thomas swivels his eyes to show interest while jiggling one leg. The drizzle is turning to rain. It drips along Fran’s nose, mingling with a little snot.
Up in the higher ground where the two valleys meet and the land is tussocky and ragged, there’s a cairn of badly piled stones, the grave of Betty Pugh. Late in the last century – whoops, the nineteenth century–Betty was a young farm girl here. On an outing to the bright lights of Aberystwyth – Paris and London to these parts – she found her fresh cheeks and thick hair admired by a sailor. Seduction with promise of marriage was easy. The usual followed: she was pregnant, returned home and waited. Then despairing, she tried to drown herself in the river by Rhayader. She was rescued but, being a determined girl, she hanged herself in a cowshed. Parish churches wouldn’t take a suicide, so she was buried where no one lived or worshipped, then given a cairn to warn girls or rebuke predators. In the late 1940s a romantic American, hearing the story, made a wooden cross for the cairn and, before he left, ordered a gravestone. The land was boggy, a stone would sink in. But in time a gravestone was erected with the words ‘so sweet, so small’.
‘So, they avoided the problem of the soggy bog?’ asks Thomas.
‘The grave was made of fibreglass. I wonder what words they mumbled over it.’
‘They must have shouted loudly,’ remarks Rachel. She’s warm enough in her expensive fleece but isn’t adapting to the bluster.
By now Thomas’s ears are attuned to Shelleyan wind rustling somewhere in the newly planted firs behind them, it tugs at the spokes of his mountain bike. He moves his thighs as if riding on the spot.
‘Such a lonely death,’ says Fran. She wonders if she can mention Agafia in her tundra, watching her family die one by one.
Rachel unwraps a piece of chewing-gum; the story’s generic, but Fran’s naivety in narrating touches her. She supposes travellers have to tell tales and Fran comes across as a traveller despite the Norfolk cottage. The image pulls at Rachel: a girl buried with the child in her belly.
A mobile phone rings. Amazed to find Annie’s voice, Fran pauses after exclaiming. The line goes dead. She swallows away a sudden bleakness. ‘I could tell you about the old lead mines,’ she says. ‘You can still see mine shafts in places up the banks. The quarries seem to be biting the landscape with rotten teeth.’
‘Maybe later,’ says Rachel gently. ‘We’re here for Shelley.’ She wishes she were more interested in miners and peasants; impossible to mix with English academics without being loudly left-wing. She tries, she really does.
‘Mining and Romanticism aren’t at odds. Remember Byron and his Newstead mines,’ says Fran.
The pain of the quarries overwhelms her. The anguish below her feet, even in this beautiful place, the poor beasts, the boys and men poisoned into emphysema and fibrosis, forced into deforming labour by want and impotence – all for the comfort of a class to which Shelley – and yes even Jane Austen – belonged. She feels a stab of guilt for her mortgage-free cottage and pension. Always two nations, wherever you make the divide.
She clambers out of her rabbit hole.
The rain softens and moves off with a swish over the hills. The whole area could become a lake under this relentless water, thinks Rachel.
A chilling breeze follows the rain. With Thomas away on his cycle again, the two women head for the village café.
Standing outside with their mugs and looking towards the river, Rachel says, ‘Time for the Groves, I guess.’
Without preamble.
Charlotte, daughter of Admiral Pilfold, marries Thomas Grove, gentleman; her sister marries Sir Timothy Shelley, son of Sir Bysshe, high sheriff of Radnorshire. As a second home – they have a gentler property in Wiltshire – Grove buys an Elan estate, builds the mansion of Cwm Elan and plans to improve the poor peaty ground. Like other landlords then and now, he hunts and fishes.
Back in the wardrobe in the shabby B&B, Jane Austen lets a comment susurrate along the road and over the hills to the little café: you are troubled by agricultural improvers, I see, like my Mr Knightley, enclosing land from selfishness or good practice. It depends on point of view.
Young Shelley makes boyish love to their daughter Harriet (sixteen), knowing nothing of her inner desire: marriage to a country mansion and fourteen children, as it happens. His impassioned suit, welcomed at first – they were as good as engaged, else why keep a lock of her hair in his diary? – ultimately fails to prosper. Some think this love the deepest of his life.
There’s also a son, Tom, Percy’s senior by some ten years, a self-important, rather formal lad – Thomas Ashe? The women exchange half-smiles – to whom his father gifts Cwm Elan. He’s only twenty-one. Two years later, he brings home a wife, Henrietta; together the couple spend warm summer months in Elan. The poor lady’s often ill.
Fran interrupts. How can Rachel speak of weather in Elan? The arrogance of biography. ‘Even in August the deep valley can’t have been good for a weak chest,’ she says.
‘Indeed.’
Spurned in love, Percy naturally longs to die. But, why, without an audience? He finds comfort through his schoolgirl sisters, who’ve introduced him to a second, more malleable and younger Harriet. Aged fifteen, she’s the daughter of an innkeeper, prosperous enough to send his child to a genteel boarding-school to mix with the granddaughters of baronets.
Not quite a grocer, but not much better.
Full of high utopian thoughts and scorn for families – and, theoretically, class (Rachel nods to Fran) – young Percy in Oxford is desperate to tweak the nose of father-surrogates. A boyhood prank – inquiring of clerics what God was, then publishing their muddled response – blows him out of the place.
‘University College makes much of him now,’ says Fran, ‘it’s always the way.’
Poor whiggish Sir Timothy is bemused by this child who thinks obedience a sin against the self.
Percy flees to his cousins in Elan. The mythologically inclined might argue that children get as far from parents as they can to avoid being caught in the gothic horror, paternal strangling.
Fran stares at Rachel. Why the intensity? She rubs her palms together and keeps silent.
Men, remarks Jane Austen from the wardrobe, have no idea of the tunnel of possibilities available to a woman, the adolescent arrogance their sisters cannot share.
Shelley writes that he finds Elan Valley a great bore, he’s no interest in purple heather or ochre gorse. A few days later he’s more impressed – or he addresses a less laddish correspondent: ‘Rocks piled on each other to tremendous heights, rivers formed into cataracts by their projections, & valleys clothed with woods, present an appearance of enchantment.’
Already Shelleyan, he flings himself down on grass, curls earth with his toes and hears water rushing and roaring through his head. He takes lonely walks, is touched by magic and longs for thunderstorms. Very likely he sports wild flowers in his hair, old man’s beard and bee orchids. Self-absorbed of course, because the thingy world is nothing to him.
It was all in all to me, barring immortality, interjects Jane Austen quietly. She hasn’t been able to stay in the wardrobe.
I thought not, says Fran. You like a story.
My men tell good tales – Colonel Brandon, Mr Darcy, and handsome Captain Wentworth …
Patrician
, he’s grown up in silk pantaloons. At sixteen he describes himself as independent, the ‘heir of a gentleman of large fortune’.
Jane Austen notes the implied rebuff – a real gentleman’s wealth is not precise. Unusually, she blushes.
So, notwithstanding his reading of the lower-class firebrand Godwin, he yet provokes a bill like this – Rachel consults her waterproof notebook:
A Superfine Olive Coat Gilt Buttons 4 8 0
A Pair Rich Silk Knitt Pantaloons 3 8 0
Two Stripd Marcela Waistcoats Double Breastd 2 0 0
1. Pair Patent Silk Braces 0 8 0
A Superfine Blue Coat Velvett Collr & Gilt Buttns 4 12 0
Jane Austen gulps. She thinks of those bonnet trimmings and collar turnings, the tedious mending of petticoats and socks. ‘I am a gentleman’s daughter’ is the proud boast of all her heroines – except perhaps poor Fanny Price – yet it can’t equal this. The ‘large fortune’ you know.
Fran’s impressed. ‘Did he ever pay for these items?’ She knows the answer: not something that concerns a negligent aristocrat.
In my Beautiful Cassandra, adds Jane Austen, even as a child I was aware of such carelessness. Eating six ices from a pastry-cook without paying. What a noble fantasy.
At last Fran can proffer her own information, something stumbled on in her days of ‘research’ in the Cambridge Library.
In 1878 – when Shelley had become a National Treasure – an old woman, who as a girl delivered post to Cwm Elan, recalled ‘a very strange gentleman’. On weekdays he wore a little cap but on Sundays to go with the family to church he put on a tall hat. He sailed a foot-long wooden boat in the rapid mountain streams and ran along the bank, using a pole to direct his craft and keep it off the rocks. Once he forced a cat to get in.
There you see him. The man-child sailing toy boats, caring not a whit for a reluctant cat, watching perhaps as water penetrated the wood and the sail collapsed, all losing form, the cat whining piteously.