by Janet Todd
Catching up with her outside the shop, Annie says affectionately, ‘Poor Fran, you just can’t bear being in a crowd, can you?’
They move out on to the terrace overlooking the Grand Canal to sit on a low step.
‘Tamsin is good,’ whispers Annie, ‘just concise adjectives and no “likes”.’
‘Good at or just good?’ says Fran.
From inside they overhear a woman – Japanese, with hint of West Coast vocal fry? – say clearly, ‘You English-speakers can’t bear to be without a subject, it makes you very important to yourselves.’ Close by, a man takes photos of the opposite palazzi, then, when their eyes turn away, focuses on the upright penis of the boy astride the metal horse. As Tamsin, then Rachel, come out, he scuttles off.
Rachel’s regarding Tamsin, ‘I hear you’re an academic influencer?’
‘Well, yeah, I kind of market my niceness.’
‘Goodness,’ says Fran, ‘does niceness sell?’
Annie smiles. ‘Are you nice, Tamsin? We think you are.’
‘Oh yes, well, kind of,’ Tamsin chuckles. ‘It pays. But doing it well can stress you out.’
‘You do it well, I’m sure,’ says Rachel, wondering whether to mention to Tamsin that she has a white oleander petal caught prettily in her hair.
Tamsin gnaws her lip, ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do get hits.’
Fran looks vague.
‘Light TV slots, TED talks, those things – I put myself around, you know, as a thinklister. Instagram, Twitter, You-Tube. My marketing platform …’ She stops and grins.
‘Tiring when you put it like that,’ says Annie, moderately impressed.
Fran studies Tamsin, puzzled. ‘She can’t be tired of anything. She hasn’t had time.’
‘Bruh, come off it, you weren’t so very young when you were my age, you know it. Loads of poets have done their work by now, Keats, Chatterton, Keith Douglas, 2Pac, yeah Shelley too.’
‘Is that why you hang round with us,’ asks Fran, ‘to get away from success?’
‘Maybe.’
Annie wonders if it’s the masked Venetian air that’s paradoxically making them want to unmask, or seem to.
‘Could you live without the stroking now?’ asks Rachel, ‘Isn’t it addictive?’
‘Dunno,’ says Tamsin, flicking her head and making those eye movements, innate or learned, that so fascinate Fran. The petal stays fixed. ‘I could go on living a little in the vlogosphere, I guess,’ she chuckles, ‘delighting my followers. But then maybe you think I’ve done too much niceness to power any more ambition?’ She pauses. Annie and Fran puzzle over her tone. She’s addressing only Rachel. ‘I think, now you ask, I’d kind of like not to be an academic. It’s so compromised.’
‘What then?’
Tamsin bursts out laughing, her head thrown back further than seems possible to Fran. The petal is dislodged. ‘Maybe a columnist on a bestselling daily, read by everyone, then tossed away. Be feared at parties when my logo enters the room – I’d fix the photo’ – she runs her eyes down one arm. ‘I’d be opinionated, snide, prejudiced, cruel, exorbitantly well paid and fed as I feed on friends, scandal and celebs. I’d drink blue cocktails with beautiful trans people, then like tell on them. I wouldn’t be nice.’
‘Heavens! You’ve thought it out? I guess if the shilling’s there for the taking,’ says Fran.
‘Interesting,’ says Annie seriously, ‘very, but quite alien to you, and us.’
Tamsin laughs again, a little uneasily as she sees Rachel isn’t responding.
Annie and Rachel begin talking about Peggy Guggenheim’s untalented daughter, but Fran remains intrigued by Tamsin. ‘Are you describing a sort of writing or investigating yourself in public? I want to understand.’
‘Maybe, kind of, through an image.’
‘Is that why you like Shelley, because he’s always looking at images of himself in others?’
‘What makes you think I like Shelley,’ says Tamsin, opening her eyes wide.
‘Ah,’ says Fran, ‘and he certainly wasn’t nice.’ She’s absurdly pleased when her remark raises another great hoot of laughter in Tamsin.
She turns to find the other two have re-entered the Museum.
Later in the day, after smoking a few joints, Tamsin makes slow love with Thomas in the bare palazzo room with its tarnished mirrors and vast hard bed. The light is dim and yellow.
When they stop to regard each other, to her surprise Tamsin sees Thomas agonising. Strange! He’s noticed a brown, voluptuous woman and followed a wholesome urge. She didn’t repel him, unruly desire satisfied on both sides. She doesn’t want sentimental sex. Nor he, surely. So why the abstraction? She squeezes his hand, ‘You can’t have everything.’
Outside the palazzo she’s drenched by one of Venice’s sudden tumultuous downpours. Hearing the rain belatedly, Thomas comes out on to the stairs where a window fronts a little square. Tamsin gazes up to see his face as the rain eases. She looks dazzling with her thick hair wet and glistening. She knows Thomas’s guilt is swept away in her glory. She raises her arms to prayer position over her dripping head.
*
All five of them meet on the Zattere for dinner – of booze and carbs, as Tamsin puts it. ‘Spare us gastronomy as culture,’ she says before Rachel opens her mouth.
This time they sit outside by the canal. Annie isn’t yet holding a cigarette, but knows she can: all the difference.
Fran dislikes the taste but enjoys fizzy prosecco popping in her lungs. It makes a shower of sparks, iridescent and evanescent and organically astounding. How vivacious, she thinks, knowing she won’t sleep a wink after it.
A gigantic ocean liner passes by dwarfing them all, its cargo of insects gazing across the miniature town. Beside the great ship a small speedy boat dashes along, a wasp buzzing round an elephant. Its bow wave bounces the moored boats, making them dance and jitter in the sparkling water. The liner’s gentle swell merely sloshes the bank, wetting the bottom of Tamsin’s canvas bag and Thomas’s trainers. Neither notices.
‘The long light really shakes,’ says Fran still thinking of ‘The Lady of Shalott’. ‘Did Tennyson ever visit?’
‘Yeah,’ says Thomas, ‘when old. Came for Shelley. He was disappointed. He’d waited too long to see Venice. Its art didn’t move him, or his eyes were too dim. The canals seemed less picturesque than the pictures he’d long contemplated. How could he like it?’
‘A common problem,’ says Rachel, knowing it works both ways: see it too early and in the wrong company – or too late. Beautiful Venice – blowsy, vulgar and tedious.
‘Tennyson didn’t stay in the Danieli but in a new hotel on the Lido. I like to think of that tremendous beard lounging on a sunbed in up-to-date accommodation. In the evening he was rowed out in a gondola to watch the sunset, think of Shelley and remember love and youth.’
‘Did he find Shelley?’
‘No.’
Tamsin is touching her bare toes to Thomas’s calf under the table.
23
‘Must get Byron and Shelley together,’ says Thomas as coffees arrive – with complimentary limoncello. He feels the warmth of Tamsin’s feet up his legs and into his groin.
Two poets: a dance duet, with Mary Shelley’s stepsister as conductor, the wild child.
‘I see the women as just so many holes and orifices in this story,’ says Fran.
‘Crude,’ smiles Rachel, wrongly assuming metaphor, ‘both poets treated women as more than just wombs and cunts.’
Jane Austen sniffs: she deplores bad language. She settles herself for a rigmarole.
Rachel clears her throat. There’ll be no unnecessary dialogue: quicker to tell – a power shared by fiction and non-. Take it or leave it, scan or skip.
A woman after my own heart, whispers Jane Austen. You can make tragedy into comedy and vice versa with a verb.
The men meet in Switzerland. It’s 1816, the dark summer of nightmares, sexual imbroglio and Frankenstein. Too famous to need rel
ating. Some interaction before, since Shelley had sent a poem or two – it was that way round: Byron the lord, the cynosure, and four years senior.
Summer past, Shelley and his ‘Godwin girls’ return to England while Byron travels to Venice. He takes various lodgings, then settles in Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal.
He’s in Venice for the sex – allegedly, the small city hosts twenty thousand prostitutes – and the anonymity. Courting celebrity, like all celebrities Byron is angry when criticised. He tired of shocking the English in Switzerland where he’d become a tourist attraction spied through telescopes across the lake. (Don’t be fooled: Shelley and Byron are always aware how they play to the home audience.) In Venice the noble rakehell is quickly an object of fascination – English visitors nobble his gondolier or wait for him on the Lido where he rides. Soon Shelley is in Italy too – post-war England being no place for a political visionary. Also, he believes his health improves abroad – and living is cheaper.
On 23 August 1818 (note the date) Byron takes Shelley by gondola to the Lido; horses are waiting. (On this occasion they forget, as they don’t always, that one is a lord, the other mere son of a baronet.) It’s the first of many rides along the dunes, during which the poets yacket away on art and philosophy, luxuriating in contrary views. Later, in one of Shelley’s best poems, the pair become–we simplify here – the idealistic, progressive Englishman Julian – himself – believing in man’s power through his own mind, and the charming, sceptical Venetian nobleman, Maddalo – Byron, the brilliant, bracing nihilist.
Having had time through the centuries to peruse a little of Shelley, Jane Austen remarks, I would judge ‘Julian and Maddalo’ his best work, the most realistic and human, the least turbulent and windy.
You judge by yourself, mutters Fran.
Really? Do I expose my nakedness on paper? Blame others for my life’s pain?
Fran’s attending to Rachel, not Jane Austen.
‘Both are geniuses,’ says Thomas. He has an aftertaste from the limoncello. He decides he dislikes it.
‘And hypochondriacs,’ says Fran.
Jane Austen applauds. I have already invited your Shelley to Sanditon. She claps her hands, revealing again an author’s self-centredness. He will be joined by fat Byron as plump Arthur Parker with a talent for rhyming.
Tamsin notes Thomas’s irritation. Biography isn’t her ‘thing’ but, though never final, never simply true, it must be told, aslant of course – and best without Fran’s dated judgments. ‘You go on, Thomas.’
Each is intoxicated by the other. But, possibly, here in Venice just now, Shelley’s not as impressed with Byron as Byron with him. Remember, Byron has entered his most extravagant and promiscuous phase and there’s always a Puritan streak in Shelley. He finds it hard to fuse the beautiful and vile.
Byron, he thinks, has surrounded himself with whores, garlic-smelling countesses, and Italians of ‘dwarfish intellect’: so his view is distorted and he apprehends the nothingness of human life. He’s deeply discontented.
‘See: something of England travels with Shelley, however he intends ridding himself of its grey ethical dust,’ puts in Annie.
Both are charismatic, seductive in being and talk. Neither gay though Byron had his teenaged loves – what to do in an English public school? – and perhaps reverts at his Greek end – but there’s attraction.
‘What’s the word for “erotically charmed by intellect”?’ asks Fran. ‘ “Homosocial” sounds like jocks slapping each other on the back in a pub after a rugby match.’
Ignoring Fran, Annie snaps, ‘We don’t need to buy into this myth of friendship.’ She pats down irritation. ‘Charmed for a while but also critical, even hostile, at least Shelley is to Byron. Why not? He’d be stone-dead not to feel competitive with a man of wealth, rank and fame, especially later with his own good poetry unremarked or unpublished. He writes (but doesn’t present) a sonnet to Byron, as passive-aggressive a piece of envious praise as you’ll find. As for Byron, he denies he’s intimate with men, his friendships being mere man-of-the-world ties. In the beginning he is influenced by Shelley’s visionary stuff, OK, but he soon tires of being proselytized by a man who thinks himself morally superior – in private he mocks Shelley as “Shiloh”, remember Joanna Southcott’s fake messiah-son?’ Annie shrugs. ‘Like me, I guess he thinks Shelley’s work feverish.’
‘On the contrary,’ says Thomas, ‘his poetry has an equanimity …’
‘Enough,’ interrupts Rachel. ‘I’ll continue.’
Despite being of ‘dwarfish intellect’, Byron’s final semi-official lover, the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, is observant. She finds Shelley sympathetic and sickly: he’s tall, bent, bony, his features delicate but irregular, a mouth ugly in laughter and spoilt by teeth. (Remember, Shelley’s no longer the gorgeous youth of Elan Valley.) He has freckles from too much Italian sun, abundant hair greying and unkempt, a voice almost strident. His extraordinary dress is a schoolboy’s jacket, unpolished shoes, no gloves. Yet he must always seem, she writes, the most accomplished among a thousand gentlemen.
‘Only an elegant, convent-raised Italian lady would mention shoes and lack of gloves,’ says Fran, ‘what strikes me is that word “schoolboy”.’
I’m relieved, mutters Jane Austen, nobody sketched me so minutely. An artist lives in his work.
The appreciation’s mutual, for Shelley sees in Teresa a woman to tame weak sexy Byron. Sadly, Lord Byron isn’t as in love with his reformation as Shelley and Teresa are.
To her surprise, Fran catches the eye of an elderly man on the next table, cradling a brandy and glancing at the Gazzettina folded beside his plate. She’s happier sitting here with her friends than she’s expected: contentment makes her smile. ‘I do love the speedy boats, especially at night,’ she remarks as one swishes past.
Encouraged to use his good English, the man responds, ‘Some days away young men from Mestre went joy-riding. At three o’clock in the morning they killed two fishermen. They were sitting on the lagoon by Poveglia.’
Not a bad way and place to go, thinks Fran, though premature.
Annie notes Thomas’s impatience. Though a father and not so young, he still shows the intolerance of youth, cringing at ordinary remarks of ordinary people passing the time. He’ll need to restrain this squeamishness if he wants to be a popular teacher. You have to say and listen to the obvious every day, year in year out, and with a smile.
‘It’s good, Fran, you’ve continued accosting strangers,’ whispers Annie beaming at the man, then ending the talk by looking away. ‘You’re blossoming now you’ve something other than falling leaves and rabbits to look at.’
Fran grimaces.
*
‘Near Naples, Shelley visited a macaroni factory. He was impressed by its production,’ says Thomas.
‘Awesome.’
‘Did he take samples?
‘Imagine, the Shelleys eating macaroni cheese,’ says Fran. Before Thomas can huff a reply, she excuses herself to visit the ‘services’.
Hurriedly she uses the malodorous toilet while, blessed with better stomachs or bowels, the others finish their limoncello. Thomas orders a brandy to take off the taste.
Fran hopes when she returns there’ll be nothing smelly about her person, though something of herself lingers in her nostrils. As she approaches the table, she finds the talking has grown excited. A momentary melancholy touches her: all because she’s been absent this fraction of time. Tamsin turns mischievous eyes on her.
Oh to be dust in sunlight. We are chance atoms. Mine was only ever a gentle sorrow, says Jane Austen.
Never quote Shakespeare without quotation marks, mutters Fran. Yet the idea amuses her.
Dinner over, the friends saunter towards the vaporetto stop. Thomas, Rachel and Tamsin stand on the bobbing pontoon to wave off Fran and Annie. What desire lines will coalesce in the next hour, wonders Fran, remembering with a smile her pained suspicion in Wales. Will there be danger in any prom
iscuous tangle? A little drink, then more drink, lust surfaces, trails off, becomes modest, weak, easily snuffed out, but perhaps remembered.
Wheels within wheels, says Jane Austen.
‘It must be odd for the boy,’ remarks Fran.
‘We’re out of the game,’ says Annie. ‘Let’s watch the fiery Shelley sunset tonight and not think of bodies and houses under the water, just what’s on top.’
24
Infant mortality has been falling since the mid-eighteenth century and will go on falling – but who cares about statistics when finding their first baby dead in its cradle?
‘They’re so very young,’ adds Rachel, ‘remember that. Almost children.’
Rachel, Annie and Fran have gathered for alfresco lunch near the Arsenale. Thomas arrives from rifling disappointing archives in Celestia, helped this time by his Ca’ Foscari friend. Tamsin comes after a morning online, taking advantage of the better WiFi in Thomas’s palazzo.
‘I don’t see …,’ begins Fran and stops.
At seventeen, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon to be Shelley) became what till recently was called an unmarried mother. She was more than twenty years younger than her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had been when she gave birth to a daughter, then promptly died. The second Mary was seduced (or seducing) beside the first Mary’s grave in St Pancras Churchyard. The seducer (or seduced) was Percy Bysshe Shelley, a beautiful married man of twenty-three.
Born 22 February 1815, two months before term, Mary’s first baby is named Clara. Despite his failure with Harriet and Elizabeth Hitchener, Percy Bysshe still hankers after communes, sexy couplings that now include Mary’s stepsister, with whom he was probably …