by Janet Todd
Some element in their many encounters urged her to speak of herself: I wanted to be a writer, she’d said. Or rather I am a writer, the label really means a detachment from your actual life, well semi-detachment.
She was boring the boy. ‘How do you remember your dead great-grandfather?’
He shrugged. ‘Like Grandad, s’pose.’
But he’s not dead.
‘Same thing.’
She accepted she’d lost the boy.
After all, it was routine, she paid to teach, he to learn, his last chance. So, if she had a tie to him, it was no enchanting affinity.
He’ll be grown up now, seeking revenge like the rest of us, making joy and discontent with his beauty. Perhaps he resembles an Aubrey Beardsley drawing, gorgeous and deliciously debauched. She’d have liked to learn he became something traditional like a poet, a violinist, a painter on wood – she was still old-fashioned there. It made more sense he’d become a star of some media with his honey skin and mother’s radiance. She could probably find out by searching the Internet, but let’s leave him in his golden adolescence, with so much inchoate promise.
She goes out to walk round her pretty garden. The weight of clippers and trowels in kangaroo pockets pulls her baggy jump suit towards her crotch. It makes her feel both free and prepared.
The garden isn’t finished. What garden is? Nothing living can be. Just books. That’s why novels are so dangerous, they give false ideas of permanence. For readers, that is.
I love a neat garden, says Jane Austen, flowers, fruit, borders.
Back inside after deadheading a few roses and pulling up some towering weeds by the greenhouse, she writes, ‘My name is Fran, widow – possibly’. She scratches out the word and substitutes ‘probably’, then obliterates that too – ‘daughter, mother and friend.’ After less than a minute staring at and adjusting her sentence, she exclaims, I need dialogue.
You’ve learnt something, sighs Jane Austen. ‘Alone’ always has someone else. She gives one of those particular smiles. Something always serves, nothing will sometimes serve.
Oh fuck, says Fran. She tears out and crumples her page. A great eraser and cross-writer, Jane Austen scowls at the waste of paper.
Piles of books lean against the wall. They’ve travelled with Fran, she owes them loyalty. But they’ve bred without her consent. ‘I’ll drown my books,’ says Prospero.
An over-dramatic response to unwanted volumes, even magic ones that can uproot pine and cedar.
Her books are paperbacks, yellowing faster than antique lace, hardback unread biographies and out-of-fashion poetry, a few brown crumblies.
Instead of scribbling or sifting books, Fran decides on deep cleaning. She scrubs the dirtiest parts of the kitchen floor, then attacks the smudged, fat-stained stove. From time to time she looks through the little window to see if the regular blackbird has come.
It hasn’t, so she listens instead to the cooing and plonking of pigeons. The stove is now brighter but still smudged; it shows up the grubbiness of counter tops and wooden cabinet doors. Annie suggested distressing them.
With all this desire to clean, clear and remember, at once speak and be silent, is Fran having a late mid-life crisis? An old-age crisis? She regards her gardening hands. Thin paper skin stretching like poor soil over rocky veins.
Jane Austen doesn’t see housework as ‘work’. Never mistake my life for yours, snaps the Author. We women always had servants, a goodly number, even at our poorest. You have transport and can go where you wish, but I, with only a donkey-cart, was always served. I was never on my knees in a garden or on a kitchen floor.
To avoid more coffee after her cleaning, Fran makes a cup of Celestial Seasonings tea, then sits cradling the mug. The taste is nothing, it’s the comfy bear with the cat on the box that makes her infuse and drink.
She sips, thinking of the trip to Venice with Annie, Thomas and Rachel. By turns she’s excited and apprehensive. They’d come to her place, she’ll go to theirs – to Shelley’s and Annie’s: Annie with her luscious colour schemes is a walking Venice. Fran will be the odd one out, she must expect it and prepare.
Jane Austen closes her eyes, exasperated, Why not seize the pleasure? How often is happiness destroyed by foolish preparation!
Sometimes Jane Austen has a point.
Fran imagines them in Cambridge now: Thomas, Rachel, Annie and a gaggle of confident youths, perhaps buoyant lovely Tamsin. Doing what they do there, day in, day out. Reading, writing, talking, talking, sipping strong coffee, sherry, wine, walking from courts to panelled rooms, cycling imperiously through ambling tourists and townsfolk, served good free food, talking again into phones and to themselves. Paid for it, entitled for the moment whatever their race or gender – or even original class. (Why not add ‘age’ to the potent trinity? The biggest category, in time including everyone not prematurely dead.)
She returns to thinking of the town itself, the Backs, King’s Parade, Petty Cury, no longer full of fish and odd smells but chain cafés and cheap shoe shops, the low swampy parks good only to cycle through. Cambridge does spring better than anywhere, but it’s high summer now – time for trippers and roistering parties, the sluggish chalk river a fairground dodgem-track of swollen punts, pink canoes and colourful kayaks.
Should she ring Johnnie? The hour’s always wrong. She never knows what she’s barging into. He’d say the right thing, as always, but would she? She’d hear the alien life in the background, the children’s strange New Zealand vowels.
Johnnie – burdensome after Andrew ‘left’, but the warmest loveliest, most soothingly disturbing burden a life could have.
She wishes she could speak to her own mother. Too late. If she looks in the mirror, she sees a version of her but not to talk to. Poor Mum, she’d begun sinking almost at once without the man she loved wholly or at least needed wholly and probably loved, though Dad’s indiscriminate benevolence, his kindness to all and sundry, riled her. With no elm to cling to, she’s forsaken ivy, trailing her thoughts limply in a ‘home’.
Silly to think like this; dementia doesn’t come from life’s vicissitudes or weaknesses, it’s a disease in the brain, not an eviction of mind. Dad would have coped, dressing his once capable wife’s body each morning in proper clothes – ironed blouse, straight skirt, and stockings – propping it in a chair, and replying to the polite phrases still rattling round the emptying skull, and even, when the worst arrived, changing pads and wiping a drooling mouth, but never letting the indignity obliterate their past, never as long as he drew breath and his arm worked, banishing his wife to a ‘home’.
This, thinks Fran, is coupledom at its best. Annie and she had never got the hang of it. Or was the model hopelessly old-fashioned?
Oh well, Andrew, we didn’t make such a hash of it, did we? Johnnie is a good boy.
She looks through the window and this time the blackbird is there, on the patch of grass in front of the holm oak, stabbing the ground with its bright beak. Over and over in the same place, as if its bird brain has no memory.
16
Fran’s bedroom has what Charles Dickens called sad-coloured curtains. She finds them soothing as she lies under the summer duvet anticipating the order of inshore waters in the Shipping Forecast. A depression over Iceland apparently. Some minutes later she learns that in South Norfolk it will be a mostly sunny day: high cloud and an easterly breeze. Contrarily, she imagines snow falling.
One year, it fell long and hard over the Long Mynd. Everyone worried about the ponies; then, as it continued, about themselves.
Down into the steep valleys and along the main roads and rail lines it fell, disguising them as the fields they once were. It was Boxing Day, the beginning of the deflated season after too much sugar. Especially this year, for Mum had made trays of mince pies to give to visitors. Since none came because of the weather, it was a kindness to gorge as many as possible.
Dad tapped his barometer. Knowing the sad consequence of snowfalls, he was
excited nonetheless. The war had been good to him, as he to it; dangers, extremes, made his heart race. Mum was from Radnorshire; snow meant frozen hens and buried sheep.
Years on, this particular winter will become famous as the coldest one since – well, some time, forever. The educated said 1683 or 1739, though Fran doubts measurements were accurate enough for anyone to be certain. The proof comes from art: lighting fires, roasting oxen, and making mayhem on the Thames with cartoon phrases flying from mouths. We know how false art can be when it proposes to tell history.
Andrew, big quiet Andrew, came to stay, arriving on one of the last trains. He brought off-kilter gifts, a wooden pocket puzzle for Dad, a daisy candleholder for Mum, and a long-playing record for Fran, whose little gramophone took only 45s.
Jumping the gun as usual, Mum thought him too big. ‘You’re too short for him,’ she said, ‘child-bearing would be trying.’ ‘Honestly,’ she’d replied as she often did when exasperated at her parents’ simplicity. ‘Honestly!’
Andrew was studying Geology and there wasn’t much talk to be got from that. He’d fallen for garrulous, cheerful Fran and pursued her even though she’d had her eyes – hopelessly in the event – on the boy sharing his rooms off Grange Road, a show-off poet intending to amaze the world; he was exiled in Selwyn when he should have been at King’s.
Mum and Andrew did their best to chat. Neither best was enough. There were silences whenever the two were alone. Unless the corgi was there; then Andrew patted its square rump and admired its yappy spirit. The house was warmer than his own centrally heated home in Twickenham, for the coal-burning stove in the kitchen was unregulated and splashed its heat through the whole house. Bigger than all of them, he was uncomfortable in the suffocating chairs and sofas bought to accommodate smaller folk. He wasn’t used to the steep-sloping ceilings of the attic rooms; they could hear him banging his head every time he climbed to his bedroom, then suppressing his groans where each of them would have cried out, not using naughty words of course but variants, Gosh, Goodness, Heavens Above, My Giddy Aunt. Though, since she started at College, Fran now regularly said Fuck.
His ways were towny ways, not theirs. Yet everyone had the greatest good will and sometimes, when all together, they got on amicably, with Dad and Fran doing most of the talking. The telly was a fine source of topics. Andrew said the London smog reached even Twickenham. Mum said yes, she’d heard that on the news. There was a lot of mist when she was a girl, but she supposed that was different. Andrew said it was. Smog was man-made. ‘They will stop it by stopping coal fires completely,’ he said. ‘Oh,’ said Mum, we love our coal fires, don’t we, John?’ She stoked the sitting-room grate which augmented the big stove. She’d been cold most of her childhood and was grateful for a marriage that brought such warmth. Years later, Fran realised her own wheezing had as much to do with her family’s heating methods as with the corgi. Both gone and her parents in a modern bungalow with no grate in the sitting room, she breathed normally. But she missed the corgi and the blanketing, coal-sucking heat.
Sometimes in the past, thinking back, she felt shame for one or other of her parents, their gentle efforts to make Andrew feel ‘at home’ or ‘bring him out of his shell’. (Mum annoyingly called him Fran’s boyfriend.) At others, she was ashamed for Andrew. Now she wondered at her own graceless feelings.
After a couple of days, Christmas would officially end above the little shop. Time for Dad to start taking stock and look through accounts, and for Mum to check outstanding orders before they opened again and welcomed the High Street. So many orders there were: people ate more on Christmas Day, but why after? Mum kept herself trim and exclaimed over portly customers and their extra demands for chocolate, syrup, Welsh cakes and potatoes.
Then, just as everyone was wondering whether the visit, lovely for the young people but a bit of a strain, might now be over, and Andrew’s own parents and brothers missing him in Twickenham, it snowed again. It went on snowing. Gales whipped up a blizzard. Power lines tumbled down. Villages, remote houses and the few farms to whom Dad delivered his special ham and groceries were cut off in drifts. Coal wasn’t delivered either, many houses had no back-up of wood to burn.
‘Poor people,’ said Mum. And they were. They’d eaten their turkey and Christmas pudding and were isolated in cold parlours full of aunts, uncles, grandchildren, and all the unskilled stuff of Christmas. Trains weren’t running, so there was no question of visitors going home.
Under the snow and wind, the awkwardness in the warm house diminished. Andrew felt its cosiness although he still bumped his head on the attic ceiling and knocked into the occasional table placed where Mum left her glasses and keys, well below the eyeline of someone over six feet. It was all right: Andrew was furniture now.
I know, so cosy, intrudes Jane Austen. At Randalls in the Westons’ Christmas party, as snow falls and Emma …
Shhh you weren’t there yet.
Snow drifted up the shop window making the High Street with its steep cambers into a flat untrodden plain.
No chance of opening the front door, but the back stable door on to the sloping courtyard might be possible. Dad and Andrew pushed and pushed against its thickness till they forced a crack in the bottom half which, after a further greater push, they could squash through. They began shovelling snow out through the big back gates that led from the courtyard over the rough path to scrub beyond, Andrew piling his snow with almost artistic neatness. Mum and Fran watched, Fran suddenly aware how short Dad was. She knew about Mum, but Dad was a surprise. She offered to help, but there were only two big shovels. It was before feminism and she didn’t insist. Besides, she didn’t like the cold.
While the men shovelled, Mum baked scones and sponge cakes and made meat pies to ‘feed the workers’. They weren’t short of food – how could they be? – a whole shop to eat their way through and courtyard lofts full of grain, oats, rice and sweet-smelling Bramley apples stored for crumbles and charlottes during the dreary months of January and February. They could have lived isolated for years and been well fed. Even with big lanky Andrew, who, Mum said, must need ‘building up’.
‘The Jenkinses,’ Dad exclaimed, ‘the Keelings and Eveleighs, how will they cope without my delivery?’
Still snow fell and ice hardened between layers. The low front shop-window grew darker and darker with cold padding. The telly was intermittent but, when it worked, Mum watched with her ironing board set up in front. ‘The sea’s freezing,’ she said.
‘The news is always sensational,’ Dad replied. Fran thought he remembered the War when he said this. She imagined him being rescued from destroyers that sank under him, then jumping back into the ice of Scapa Flow to pull out bodies. He’d remark, when praised, it was nothing ‘sensational’.
‘We have to do deliveries,’ he said.
‘It would be madness, John. You’d be lost in a snowdrift in no time.’
‘We must, all those people depending on us.’
Andrew was on the sofa away from the fire. ‘I can drive. I’ve passed my test.’
‘Madness,’ said Mum.
‘It’s a big van, Andrew,’ said Dad, ‘but maybe together.’
‘Sheer madness,’ said Mum.
‘The farmers will be out of pocket,’ said Dad, ‘the tubers will freeze in the ground. It’s that cold.’
The telly fell into its night-time silence. When it came on again in the morning, it showed people skating on the Thames.
‘Do you live near the Thames?’ asked Mum.
‘Twickenham is on the Thames,’ said Andrew.
‘Oh,’ said Mum, ‘that’s nice.’
Andrew and Dad scraped snow off the van. It took them best part of the freezing morning. At first the engine wouldn’t start, but after coaxing it sputtered and came to life. ‘It’s a grand machine,’ said Dad.
Clucking disapproval, Mum made up outstanding orders. Telephone lines were down, so she and Fran packed up other ones, assuming what might be
wanted. Mum kept the score. ‘Prices will go up, it says so on the wireless. New supermarkets will be raking it in.’
‘No need for us to do that,’ said Dad.
‘You always were a soft touch, John.’
The women stood watching as snow continued falling and the men set off in the van, the great shovels packed in the back for clearing lanes where snow ploughs had failed. Both were calm, matter-of-fact.
They returned way after dark. Mum was baking again to pass her anxious time. Fran was reading.
‘They were so grateful,’ said Dad, ‘the Keelings all came tumbling out of the farm when they saw the van coming. They pressed tea and cake on us everywhere we went, they were that pleased.’
‘So they should be,’ said Mum wiping her floury hands on her housecoat.
Andrew’s eyes were shining.
The snow went on through the next weeks, but trains were soon running again, with signalmen pouring boiling water over the signals to force them up and down.
Andrew left. Had his mother or a brother phoned, were telephone lines restored? Perhaps he just went because the ‘holiday’ was over. Everyone liked him by now.
‘I couldn’t have done it without that boy,’ said Dad.
‘You could do worse,’ said Mum to Fran.
She’ll get up and ring Johnnie, even if his vowels have changed and the hour is wrong. ‘I love you,’ she’ll say. He’ll pause a moment, then reply, ‘I love you too, Mum.’
17
The Master’s wife appraises Annie’s embroidered, purple-sequinned décolletage, edged by the black gown on which – against all propriety – she’s pinned a glittering purple brooch. She whispers publicly across the table, ‘My dear, you have such style.’
Annie smiles. She intends her eyes to be cool but they reflect the sparkle from the brooch.