Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

  Rachel shrugs. The idea isn’t preposterous.

  *

  ‘Are we all going?’ asks Fran later, meeting the others for another coffee perched on spindly metal chairs by the market flower stall. ‘The whole caboodle?’

  ‘If you mean me as caboodle, then yeah,’ laughs Tamsin, ‘I’m in; they’ll have WiFi and I can like apply for things if I have to on my iPad. Besides, I have to go to Italy for research.’ She smiles slyly at Annie, who’s adjusting her purple and mauve scarf caught in the twists of her dangling birdcage ear-rings. ‘African-Americans scootered all over. Italians liked them and they liked Italians till the Fascists marched into Ethiopia. Bet you guys never heard of David F. Dorr and his book A Colored Man Round the World?’

  ‘Right there,’ says Annie, ‘and you’ll tell us about it.’

  ‘Nah,’ replies Tamsin. ‘Out of my period – 1852 – but you can like read it. Usual story. Dorr went to Italy with a Louisiana plantation owner who said he’d free him when they got back and didn’t. So he ran off to Ohio and wrote his book. Not that interesting to be honest, I’m more like into divas of colour. It’s a sideline,’ she adds as Annie looks quizzical. ‘Everyone loves a singing-dancing diva and, man, do we breed them: Mattiwilda Dobbs, Ellabelle Davis, Leontyne Price, Katherine Dunham, Maya Angelou.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Fran, wondering how Tamsin gets the tints on her lower eye-rim. What would happen to the iridescent greeny-blue if she cried salt tears over those vivid tawny cheeks? She’d have to suck them back. Can an eye suck in like a throat or a nose sniffing? If other orifices can withdraw expression, why not an eye? Not an ear though.

  Tamsin shrugs, ‘Of course I can be doggo if you prefer.’

  ‘My grant,’ Thomas is saying, ‘lets me track Shelley in Venice like in Wales.’

  ‘What about your family?’ Fran shouldn’t ask.

  ‘Kiran never wants to stand in the way of my work.’ Thomas pauses before adding, ‘She’s happy for me to go with you.’

  ‘We thought we were going with you,’ says Fran.

  ‘You know,’ intrudes Rachel, wanting to move off the personal, ‘Virginia Woolf detested Venice.’

  That snobbish body would detest any person or place she considered ‘underbred’. Venice is supremely vulgar.

  Tamsin is saying, ‘I guess you guys don’t watch Doctor Who? Well, in one episode, Doctor Who and her team time-travel to Villa Diodati on the ghostly night in 1816 when Frankenstein is born. It turns out the person whose visions are making all life and history vulnerable is Shelley. He’s like the “guide”. When it’s suggested he might be sacrificed to save the rest, you get his “Defence of Poetry”, arguing poetry is a mirror making beautiful what’s distorted. His thoughts will inspire centuries, so his words like matter. Save the poetry, save the universe. See? Yet when it comes to the ending and the need, like in an upmarket funeral, is for fine lines to intone, they don’t use Shelley’s utopia but Byron’s dystopia, “Darkness”:

  The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,

  And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need

  Of aid from them – She was the Universe.

  Byron can lay it on.’

  Fran’s impressed at Tamsin storing so much English men’s poetry. A vision of her as a memorising forties’ schoolgirl with crooked or no teeth – some girls had them all pulled, so the false would deliver film-star smiles. She blinks away the vision.

  ‘I’ve been to Villa Diodati,’ says Thomas

  ‘Yikes, on another grant,’ laughs Tamsin showing a set of level white teeth.

  Did anyone have teeth like this when Fran was a girl? How do they do it?

  ‘Well, yes. It’s suburban now.’

  ‘I’d better read up on it all. I’ve been to Venice only once, as a student, for half a day on the way to Yugoslavia. It rained.’ She didn’t mention how the water stabbed through Andrew’s black umbrella.

  Thomas looks at her complacently. ‘Reading up’s the way.’ He shrugs. ‘Remember, Byron’s Venice was created by Ann Radcliffe. She’d never been there and she took it from Dr Johnson’s great friend, Hester Piozzi. Then Byron creates Venice for everyone after, including the art critic Ruskin and Turner. So the city’s always already written and read.’

  Fran raises her eyes, as Jane Austen so often does under that symmetrically curled hair.

  What, pray, is the difference in memory between seeing a place and reading of it, looking directly or through an image? In the Middle Ages one might receive indulgence for sins by doing pilgrimage to a decent copy of a shrine.

  To prevent Fran reacting to what she’ll judge patronising, Annie butts in, ‘We should all read Mrs Piozzi before going. Her Venice stank and was infested with beggars and filth; no cows, so no fresh milk. But she does glamour charmingly: lights and music in the piazza, swishing gondolas, laughter from cafés across the lagoon. Byron too sees ordinary within extraordinary. Venice is perhaps his most creative time: excess writing, excess sex. He wrote to his publisher John Murray, “There’s a whore on my right/For I rhyme best at night.”’

  My John Murray, adds Jane Austen, was a rogue, he would have drooled over such salacious letters.

  Murray was generous to you, mutters Fran, you and your brother miscalculated. You thought your copyright more valuable than it was.

  Jane Austen is remembering her amazing future worth. In the long run …

  In the long run we are all dead.

  Murray wasn’t infallible. He turned down Frankenstein.

  ‘I thought we were going for Shelley,’ says Rachel. ‘Are you a bit enthralled by Byron, Annie?’

  ‘Italy’s always Byron’s rather than Shelley’s.’

  Thomas’s phone rings. He turns away to answer it, then stands up. ‘Yes, yup,’ he says at intervals. ‘I’ll see about it. Yup.’

  Fran studies Tamsin, busy speed-tapping her phone. Remembering the quiz about old age, she turns to Annie and Rachel, ‘Do you think she’s writing a blog about elderly feminists?’

  ‘She wouldn’t get far with fringe people like us,’ grins Rachel. ‘If “we” were so powerful in the sixties and seventies, why aren’t we in charge now, Tamsin? Have the Young throttled us?’

  ‘But you are,’ says Tamsin, surprised, her fingers momentarily still. She chuckles. ‘You don’t know your privilege. Those exclusionary binaries in race and gender, you still impose them.’

  ‘Really? Is cutting off a breast like cutting off a dick?’

  ‘Forget tits. You can’t dig for the clitoris without like serious damage. No great tradition of Western literature to draw from, though.’

  ‘Doesn’t pee at a distance.’

  ‘Gross,’ says Tamsin, ‘no penis envy I hope, Fran. Who wants that wobbly stuff to truss up?’

  ‘Well the owners obviously do,’ says Rachel grinning towards Thomas now pacing nearby, his phone at his ear. ‘They talk of it enough. Remember Updike being called a “penis with a thesaurus”? I see the thing moving like a slug over the page leaving its trail of slime.’

  ‘What would it write?’ says Tamsin, ‘pussy pages I guess.’ She gets up, scratching her metal chair along the pavement. She touches Thomas as she passes. ‘Ciao,’ she says. ‘Getting into practice.’

  Thomas waves towards her back as she marches down the market aisle of ethnic food.

  Glancing at the mounds of dark spelt and rye bread and the steel pans of Mexican beans, Tamsin is considering the temptation of old people sauntering along memory lane. If she’s spending time with them, she’d better do research, find out about the Beatles and Buddy Holly or was it Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra? They probably aren’t attuned to popular culture, except maybe Rachel, who’s anyhow American and would have watched different shows. Though apparently the fat sexist guy Benny Hill was popular there too. They’ll say ‘saucy’, ‘smashing’, ‘nincompoop’ and other cringe-making words. Is there a webpage giving expressions current in, say, 1968? 1972? She wouldn’t quote them, God
no, but she’d know what was meant if they used their antique argot. ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ as Grandad used to say.

  As Tamsin retreats Fran says, ‘We can listen to her new speech, the way she says “book” and “yellow”. Quite different from you and me, Annie, wider.’

  ‘You and your vowels,’ exclaims Annie affectionately.

  I like it, says Jane Austen. The young should always differentiate themselves.

  ‘Will the trip work, I wonder.’

  ‘We need rules, like not paying according to what each eats in a restaurant?’

  ‘Time alone,’ says Fran, ‘or we’ll go mad.’

  Annie grins. ‘There’ll be plenty of that. You’re thinking of Shelley in that claustrophobic Welsh wasteland and no mobile signal. This is Venice, capital of the tourist world, with coffee bars, tacky shops and jammed canals. You can go off without us into the crowd whenever.’

  ‘If we think of ourselves as in a kind of zoo, with enough water and one or two shady places to hide, we won’t go far wrong,’ says Rachel. ‘A little screaming in private will be accepted. And we’ll be fed. We can live without waving testicles.’

  ‘Goodness, Rachel,’ laughs Fran, then adds, ‘I wonder why Tamsin sticks with us.’

  Annie swivels her eyes to land on Thomas’s fine form. He’s just putting away his mobile phone.

  ‘Hey ho,’ says Rachel smiling. ‘Plus, if she isn’t studying our outdated feminism, she can contemplate our white privilege – or should that be “white living”?’

  ‘You mean, she’s coming to shame us?’ asks Fran.

  ‘We might just have to be sensitive, that’s all,’ says Annie

  ‘Inhibited,’ says Fran, ‘tiring.’

  ‘Consciousness is tiring,’ says Thomas sitting down again. The words make Rachel smile.

  ‘Do you suppose you were sexually abused as a child, Thomas?’

  ‘Doubt it. I went to boarding-school, my classmates would have mentioned it.’

  ‘That proves it. No need to panic though. Its properly repressed. Just try to enjoy your present consciousness.’

  ‘Denial beats therapy,’ says Fran as jangling Julie swims into mind. Will she accept being schooled by Tamsin? ‘Cheaper too.’

  ‘Therapy can be hard,’ says Rachel, ‘in New York …’

  ‘Where you’re always the hero, never a bystander,’ interrupts Annie. She once rejected therapy, but now, occasionally, fancies a crutch. Too late? ‘You know, Rachel, we used to joke that in Britain, instead of an unconscious, we had a deeply interiorized sense of class.’

  ‘Gotta go,’ says Thomas, ‘sorry.’

  ‘All this talk of zoos, past feminism, and outdated whiteness makes us – you, me and Rachel – sound like a failed species,’ says Fran, ‘the European bison, better the white rhino. Maybe we are. I know you don’t like me saying it, Annie, but I feel older here. Yesterday I went into a new shop in Trinity Street to buy a cotton top, cheque book in pocket. The young assistant rushed over to ask what I wanted, her subtext being, Would I please get out of her space since the Old frighten off the glitzy Young?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ exclaims Annie, ‘age again. She perhaps thought you couldn’t pay.’

  ‘But I had a cheque book.’

  ‘Nobody uses cheques,’ says Rachel.

  ‘Shop with me next time,’ says Annie.

  ‘We’ll go together, a group’s intimidating. The staff will have to converge on us. We can invite Tamsin along – as an age-beard. We’ll buy her a skimpy sweater as reward.’

  ‘Lovely,’ says Fran, much cheered. ‘It’ll be like having a bouncy grandchild.’

  Tamsin returns with a bag of red and orange fruit. She’s surprised to see them still there. The sky’s clouding over. ‘What you guys talking about?’ she asks.

  ‘Calibration,’ says Fran, ‘how to calibrate the mind, body and blood in our future trip.’

  Tamsin drops her shopping and sits down in her old seat.

  ‘Youth thinks it will always be welcome,’ smiles Fran.

  ‘Mostly right, I guess,’ says Tamsin. She knows she’s flattering them by being there. Though she doubts they know it.

  ‘Thomas has left?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I wonder,’ says Fran ‘what it would be like to be Thomas in his long-man, toned-thighs kind of body. To see the world from higher up, two rungs on the ladder from me. Yet there’s no arrogance in the lad.’

  ‘Lad!’ laughs Tamsin, ‘only you guys!’

  Nonetheless, all look where Thomas had sat.

  You’re thinking of youth, says Jane Austen gently: remember the pains and errors of being young. A butterfly moment: you give pleasure to others more than to yourself. How do you know who’s comfortable in their own skin?

  20

  Before Fran leaves for Norfolk to pack, put out food for an absconded cat just in case, dither over the watering system – whether to risk drought or flood – she goes with Rachel to King’s Chapel: after all, both are visitors.

  ‘Tamsin lives way down there,’ says Rachel pointing along a straight road of parallel terraced cottages. ‘She had Annie and me over. She said, “It’s kind of awesome serving tea to you guys. I’ve even bought a cake.”’

  They chuckle over this young person who’s taking up more room in their minds than either expected.

  ‘What’s the point of all that grass?’ asks Fran, spying a green college court.

  ‘So only a few can walk on it,’ replies Rachel. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Clive James said that wherever there’s quiet ivy there are raving nutters. True of big lawns.’

  ‘The whole place is old-fashioned,’ Fran goes on, relieved of Annie’s restraining presence. ‘Our idea of a university is such a con trick. I blame Matthew Arnold pontificating just when science and technology were taking over, then thinking up moral and ethical justification for studying “Humanities”. Crazy to send children away from home and real-world handiwork for three pampered years when they should be turning into adults, to learn what? – nothing they couldn’t get with a little instruction and visits to an art gallery or library. Carlyle made the point years ago: “The true university of these days is a collection of books.” Serves us all right they’re now using their “education” for cultural strolling or virtue what-notting. I’d close it down. Put the money into curing Alzheimer’s and saving bees.’

  One of the ‘Fran-rants’ Annie once warned her about, their oddity being a cheery delivery. ‘There’s a mission to seek and extend human understanding too,’ Rachel smiles.

  ‘Do you know,’ Fran can’t resist a pliant audience, ‘English universities in our mediocracy aren’t accountable outside themselves, they just tot up their unread pieces of research, their “outreach” hits.’

  ‘Happy to get that off your chest?’ asks Rachel. ‘I go with Oscar Wilde, “Fortunately in England education produces no effect whatsoever”.’

  They fall silent. Jane Austen sniffs in Fran’s ear.

  ‘Well let’s enjoy the Cambridge “experience” since we’re both outsiders,’ says Rachel.

  Some faces open doors.

  Soon they’re sitting in the stalls in King’s Chapel close to the choir of older boys and men. (‘God, I would never,’ laughs Annie on hearing. ‘Grown men in frocks.’)

  Rachel stares at the little boys across the aisle. Between seven and ten she guesses. One with a chubby face and glasses moves his legs in and out, twisting his hands and nudging his neighbours. Does he know people on her side can see what he’s doing below the shelf of his prie-dieu? But it pleases her that these boys dressed and singing like angels are children under their sheets.

  She looks around at the audience, here to have a free glimpse of the usually ticketed architecture and hear the famous choir: does anyone think this motley crew of bored or bewildered tourists a congregation? She feels a little dizzy from looking up at the vaulted ceiling and Renaissance stained glass, all blue, green, slashes of yellow
, with occasional red, too indistinct to be understood as stories even if she knew the Bible and saints better than she does.

  Adjusting her neck back to its usual hinge, she notes a boy, two along from the wriggling one.

  The Boy. Her eyes widen.

  He’s fair but not quite blond with dark blue eyes and wide, naturally smiling mouth. He’s singing with none of the exaggerated gusto of his companions. Is there a twinkle in the clear eyes as he parrots the psalm? Might she catch his attention? If she succeeds, she’ll smile and nod to show she’s here for him, proud of him, knowing this whole show is to make him look aetherial. She shrugs, warning herself.

  Again she glances at the rippling white of the bespectacled child, then back to her Boy. They lock eyes. She’s unsteadied. She can almost feel herself stand up and shout, ‘Look, there’s my Boy singing his heart out.’ Something violent churns in the pit of her stomach.

  She looks away. Her face pales again, her heart ceases to pump too fast, returns to its usual syncopation.

  In the reserved seats behind her to the right sits a woman older than herself – Rachel never thinks herself old as Fran so often does. Maybe the woman’s a grandmother, maybe – the thought chills her – the Boy was looking at this shapeless, flaxenhaired blob.

  Rachel has a decent bladder but the robed guy at the door made a point that no one will pee in his church, that NO facilities are available for anyone, even the weak and aged. This warning makes her bladder leap like a fountain. She can hold on, of course, but the emotional yo-yoing waters her lower parts and returns her to herself. She shifts on the wooden bench and moves her eyes from the boy. When she glances back, he’s not looking at her or the baggy woman behind. He’s just a marvellous child singing repetitive words without meaning for him or ninety-nine per cent of his listeners.

  Goodbye, she mouths as, after the blessing, the children parade out, ghosts in their white cotton, goodbye my Boy.

  ‘That was nice,’ says Fran, ‘though I thought the Psalm would never end. I used the time to make a to-do list before our trip, while trying to guess who the chap in the red brimmed hat in the window could be. By the way, sorry for lecturing earlier.’