by Janet Todd
As a child I composed an Ode to Pity, remarks Jane Austen. Sweetly noisy falls the silent stream. I dedicated it to my sister because of her pitiful nature.
‘We should do laughing,’ announces Annie. ‘I remember you telling me about that laughter-therapy group up there in darkest Norfolk, Fran.’
Giggling, chuckling, guffawing, snorting, chortling, cackling? The young giggle, the old cackle, the semi-old chuckle.
‘We could have a chuckling room.’
Fran picks at her teeth. The Polish poppy-seed cake sold in this ethnically interesting café is full of compacted lumps of seed the size of raisins. She’d mistaken them for chocolate drops. The unseemly act reminds her of Annie more discreetly dislodging linseed from her teeth before Rachel’s ‘ceremony of innocence’ – as she now refers to the candle-scene on the Lido.
Noting Fran’s preoccupation, Annie begins. ‘But there’s a neatness …’
Fran stops teeth-picking to interrupt. ‘OK, a lost man, failed motherhood, defeated dad, absconding husband, dead baby, sorry Rachel, too frank I know, but there it is, it’s a curious coincidence.’
‘A pattern,’ says Rachel, ‘we make it.’
‘Sounds like most of the disasters are mine,’ notes Annie, sniffing to hide displeasure. ‘I mentioned our idea vaguely to my brother. He said, Why don’t you girls just check into an old people’s home?’
‘Sort of what we’re planning.’
Rachel glances at Fran. Annie catches the look. ‘She’s always downbeat. Fran has a secure provincial background, it makes her seem gloomy or stick-in-the-mud, even when she isn’t.’
Fran smiles. She thinks of her adult life – moving to and round Nigeria, back to Europe, criss-crossing Britain for temporary jobs, moving houses, struggling to integrate herself and Johnnie, making and leaving friends, coping with precarity and wrong turns, all while Annie took a sedate carriage ride from Primrose Hill to Cambridge with a detour to Paris. She grasps the role she wants in the group. The indulged misanthrope, expressing in words the facial expression of Cassandra’s portrait.
Jane Austen smiles, knowing as Fran knows, that, below layers of discontent, even sometimes despair – mainly the fault of insomnia – she’s quite a cheerful person. Occasionally, Fran’s mortified at her inability to provoke bewilderment.
‘Would you be hungry for America the Beautiful?’ she asks Rachel.
‘A little hunger’s good. I’d be satiated if I didn’t miss a meal from time to time. Also, I like being sort of baffled by the place I live in.’
‘You mean England’s like a missed lunch?’
Annie says, ‘You know, Fran and I are very fond of each other.’
‘Oh, I guessed that, kind of sisters. More? I can live with it, with you. Polyamorous.’
‘Pollyanna? Making the best …’ begins Fran before suspecting her mistake.
She blushes. She’s never been the sort to wonder about Jane Austen’s sexuality or consider what two women sharing a bed for part of their lives might or might not have done beyond keeping each other warm in the cold season, that lovely confidential spoon position.
Jane Austen’s shoulders giggle; the dead are always young. As well speculate on the Mad Hatter and March Hare, what they get up to with a dormouse in a teapot.
Yet one idea always startles Fran. Cassandra thinking her sisterly love so great that God punished her by giving Jane an early death. She shakes her head: better remember the pair as young women dressed middle-aged, exchanging private jokes while squashing pattens into the mud of Hampshire footpaths.
Grief can confuse the mind, says Jane Austen softly.
‘Seriously, Rachel, would you really leave behind all that superabundance?’
A genuine question, posed mainly to raise the topic of each one’s special wants.
Does Fran wish to engross Annie, not share her, even with Rachel? But would Fran be enough for Annie without anyone else – and, surprising herself here – would Annie be enough for her? What does an urban woman know of ground-love? London, Birmingham, Liverpool: all predators.
Rachel thinks of the money clicking over from Chase Manhattan to Lloyds even now. Is this what makes Fran (and Annie) uneasy?
‘It isn’t and wasn’t all superabundance. I missed the gold star as a child.’
Are you proposing to shack up with this pair of losers? she can hear her almost comatose mother sneer.
‘What of Thanksgiving,’ pursues Fran, ‘cinnamon apple pie, bagels and lox, 4th July, T-shirts and shorts on sexy summer days, the Bloomingdale wardrobe?’
Rachel smirks, aware only Annie and she know most of her clothes are a great deal pricier than Bloomingdales’.
‘Tamsin can make any of us feel frumpy.’
‘Thomas too,’ says Fran. ‘By the way, what did either of them get from those Shelley trips? Oh, I guess. Plus, Thomas used up some travel money and got a journal note.’
They fall silent. No need to say: what did we?
‘If we were – not saying are – living close or close-ish in Cambridge, we could rent a room cheaply to Tamsin,’ says Rachel. ‘Talented young woman.’
‘What a strange word – sounds like a biblical allergy. But yes, Tamsin warms us all.’
Annie remembers Thomas’s elated and stricken expressions. Jane Austen groans by Fran’s elbow.
‘Thomas has just risked his marriage and home.’
‘Chaos is irresistible.’
‘It isn’t though, is it? Just routine for Tamsin, fun. Why do we make her a child when she’s absent?’
‘It’s infidelity.’
‘Goodness. How quaint. He won’t abandon Kiran.’
‘I was thinking of the reverse.’
‘The young live in a foreign country, remember.’
‘Perhaps she goes for older or attached men like she enjoys old ladies, parental substitutes.’
Rachel visualises Tamsin’s grin on hearing this. Might she catch an expectation of hurrahing youth in a new story? She doubts it, knowing her thoughts are dated. She holds a residual sense that youth ought to be just a teeny bit subservient to age, and no longer is.
‘She’d be a reproach,’ says Fran. ‘She’s away in her techie world where the young are vastly superior. Fingers twinkling over tiny keys, influencing, Snapchatting or whatever. We’ve nothing to offer.’
‘A nice room.’
‘She’ll be impatient with us, and we’ll be irritated. We may have learnt control, but Tamsin?’
‘We could warn her,’ says Fran.
‘She’s not likely to say, I could tolerate you old bags as long as you give me cheap lodgings while I glitter my image and compose inflated grant applications – Annie of course providing the mother of all references, like she did for Thomas. Still, there are gestures we can read and maybe she can’t, yet.’
‘The young know better how to manage a face. We didn’t study ourselves in selfies.’
‘Do they keep taking them till they look right, then adjust expression to fit the snap?’
‘We could ask. A lot we’d like to know.’
‘Thomas doesn’t take selfies,’ says Annie, ‘but you can’t talk to him even on a phone without recalling his whole body.’
‘Wow!’
30
It’s best, remarks Jane Austen, to keep ailments private. Old age, frailty, decline and death: it is no use to lament. As I remarked shortly before dying, I never heard that even Mary Queen of Scots’s lamentation did her any good, so could not expect benefit from mine. We are all sorry, and now that subject is exhausted.
The Author flexes her fingers inside an expensive pair of red leather gloves. As a child she went gloveless, but maturity brings covering of parts.
‘My father died of boredom, I think. Listening to my mother’s aches and complaints and what her sham of a gold-digging shrink said. She posed as unhealthy when she must have the constitution of an ox. She’s ninety-seven.’
‘What did your dad do?’
Rachel shrugs, ‘Made money.’
Annie has been giving serious thought to arrangements, the inhibitions needed for communal living – if – and she’s not entirely sold on the plan – they try it. Some difficulties might be countered by feminine pleasantries. But what of infatuations, ephemeral or more? She recalls the raw, dumbfounding heat she once felt and wanted to inspire in greedy-eyed men but never knew for sure she did. Frantic grief is better understood, more overwhelming than joy. Both subside, Fran would say. Yet, Annie asks, ‘What if one of us attracts an admirer, a suitor, a beau of either sex?’
‘Fat chance. But, if it happens, you take a gun and yourself down to the end of the garden.’
‘Oh goody, we can talk in metaphors.’
‘Just keep it outside, you mean, like cats?’ says Annie, who believes all animals outdoor creatures. Extend her views to
human animals? After a pause she says, ‘I like hot baths, I want to be the colour of a lobster when I emerge. I must have a big bath just for me.’
An undignified image startles Fran: Annie pleasuring herself under the cold-water tap after the broiling, legs up the tiled wall.
She’s always assumed her friend had passing affairs at those extended conferences in Vancouver or Palermo. Mum’s word for fumbling with or without intercourse – ‘hanky-panky’ – always intervenes between Fran and solemnity in sex.
Blow-jobs, big cocks, mum-porn, jiggle-balls.
Jane Austen makes a noise between a sigh and a snort. My contemporary, the Marquis de Sade … She pauses. You think you add possibilities; you forget what you have lost.
‘I shower every day,’ says Rachel, ‘sometimes twice.’
Fran’s silent; often in winter she takes only two showers a week so as not to tax her inconstant, noisy plumbing.
Unlike sex, poor personal hygiene is unspeakable.
‘One of our first bathrooms in Philly had fuchsia and black tiles and diamond mirrors,’ says Rachel – ‘people came specially to see it.’
They chime on pleasantly enough over the weeks into late autumn, making plans in the air, on Facetime, by email and on an occasional postcard, none being quite sure she wants them carried out but certain she wants the others to want them. Real or experimental theatre?
Rules too – such as:
We must
* not emerge until ready to address the day. No slouching in trodden-down, sweat-grey slippers,
* keep accessories (and impatience) in our rooms,
* clean public spaces (or employ a less educated, more poorly paid Eastern European to vacuum and dust? Exploitative? Too much like a hostel?),
* avoid plug-ins that make a house smell like a Turkish taxi,
* talk a lot, often simultaneously, linear time being uneconomical among friends.
Jane Austen finds this list hilarious. All things are relative except decency and morality, she says at last, wiping her eyes.
‘Since we won’t share lavatories, the most important place in the house for chaos and disruption will be the stove,’ says Fran during an arranged meeting at a café in Ely. Her head holds images of Dad cleaning up after making his sticky honeyed hams. ‘Watch out for cooked sugar. Olive oil supposedly healthier than lard but just as greasy. Like drying the loo seat if you’ve misjudged, the stove must always be wiped after use.’
Annie ascribes this distasteful simile to Fran’s living alone, her irritation when anyone stays and splatters a fried egg. ‘We’d have our own bedlinen,’ she says, licking cream off an opal ring on her middle finger. ‘No sharing. I hate fitted bottom sheets. They stretch over corners like membranes on bones.’
They’ve ordered too many cakes. Only Fran feels the need to eat more than she wants. If they hadn’t been squishy, she’d have squirrelled one or two away in her bag – then forgotten them. ‘I do have some odd habits,’ Fran begins. ‘I …’
‘I know,’ interrupts Annie. ‘She listens to the Shipping Forecast in the morning and at night.’
‘We must avoid too much empathy if we’re shacking up.’
‘No letting off steam then?’
‘Venting,’ says Rachel, more linguistically up-to-date thanks to her creative-writing students, ‘it’s OK if you ask permission to reach out.’
‘Takes away spontaneity.’
‘Reach out?’ says Annie, ‘I had in mind spilling out.’
‘Listening is emotional labour,’ chuckles Rachel, ‘if you’re really going to max out.’
‘Could we stand her?’ asks Fran
‘She’s teasing,’ says Annie, ‘I hope.’
‘Sometimes I do feel like an angry ship in a bottle,’ admits Fran – she’s being too serious – ‘but the main point is to let things simmer, die down and cool, not be brought to the surface and stain everything at once.’
‘As culinary image, this isn’t quite working,’ says Rachel, ‘but I’m all for self-restraint in company. If anyone wants to confess in a church or pub, she’ll feel free. If you need a channel to the outside, I’ll be that channel.’
Fran thinks of Agafia pulled into the World when desperate to return to her own nothingness. A recluse will always relapse.
‘We love you for your quiddity, Fran,’ says Annie, noting the withdrawing face. She touches Fran’s arm.
‘For your neuro-diverse characteristics,’ says Rachel.
‘Oysters and sparkling wine?’
‘Only at weekends. Need to be rationed.’
Rachel and Annie laugh.
Jane Austen cracks one of her thin-lipped smiles.
‘You old Puritan.’
‘The pair of you are so English,’ says Rachel, then pauses. ‘Could we, truly, can we make this “new found land”?’
Desire, petty jealousies, and fears will all be unsettling.
Rachel is still the keenest. In a new variant of old anxiety, Fran wonders whether Rachel really wants to live with Annie alone, herself merely thrown in. She tries to check the thought. It’s the kind that, uncontrolled, scuppers things. Perhaps before – and if – she leaves Norfolk, she should take one of Julie’s Mindfulness courses to stop thinking what she thinks.
‘I have to retire next year,’ says Annie. ‘I could stay around supervising bits and bobs, go to the Library, be greeted less and less in Waitrose by old colleagues, squeeze myself sometimes into pre-prandial sherry, not so bad a life.’
‘I could go back to Saxtham and put organic mulch on the veggie plot, take in another cat, do community cleaning, glasseel rehabilitating, you know.’
‘Creative-writing instructors are always wanted, for lovely sunny places like Mexico and Barbados.’ Rachel swivels her head a couple of times. ‘Or we could try.’
Annie has more to give up than the others. ‘Are we being utopian? What do we really think of this? We’ve spent the past year contemplating failed communes. Would we be doomed by what we know?’ As she speaks, she realises she yearns to live with Fran. Who’d have thought?
Tea over – paid for by Fran because it’s her turn – they walk into the Cathedral Close, then circle the cloisters and as the light begins to fade cross into the sloping park heading for the station. The air has the slight chill of fading autumn. Judging by most previous years, the season will plod on into mist and murk without the drama of old snowy winters.
‘We, um, could start by renting somewhere. None of the complication of owning. A few personal pieces but live with the original floral curtains as background,’ ventures Fran.
‘God no,’ says Annie. ‘I must have decent blinds and wallpaper. We could make a joint prescription, unnegotiable demands, something to carry round in a handbag, so we make pets of each other’s monsters.’
‘Does she always talk like this?’ Rachel asks.
Fran’s still gratified she’s presumed to know more of Annie. It’s true, ‘going back a long way’ counts. Though there are times when, perversely, she wishes her friend hadn’t visited her parents in the bungalow. Residual snobbery?
She can’t tell, for Annie had been polite. Why translate courtesy into condescension?
‘I have special china for Christmas,’ says Rachel, ‘It’s still in sawdust.’
I can always find another cottage if needs be, thinks Fran.
‘Great,’ laughs Tamsin when she hears, ‘I’ll be eternally young. At home I was the grown-up beside my little brother Kwa. Here I’ll be Petra Pan outside the window tapping or clawing. Or rather inside when you guys find a grand place. I’d make it Herland of Colour. Dunno about the parthenogenesis, but, yeah, aesthetics, woven tunics and fast running.’
‘Not my vision,’ laughs Fran. ‘I had in mind something cosy like sticky-toffee pudding in winter.’ No, she thinks, not quite like that.
With nothing materially utopian to offer but never to be side-lined, Jane Austen interjects: Indulge your imagination in every possible flight which the subject will afford …
‘D. H. Lawrence proposed an intellectual community in Florida or Samoa, somewhere like luxurious and warm. They’d live his phallic philosophy of male and female unity.’
‘If I remember rightly, Tamsin, he couldn’t keep it up,’ says Rachel. ‘Sorry, unfortunate expression. His views darkened, he went back to hierarchies and strong male leaders.’
‘Oh, we may have leaders,’ Annie sings out, ‘so long as they change from day to day.’
Fran looks at her friend and, not for the first time, wonders if she’s had plastic surgery, some lifting or filling, secretly in one of those summers when she’d been taking long research trips without Paul? Did she always have such prominent cheek bones?
Annie sees Fran’s expression disengaging: will her friend gradually turn into a boxed-set-watching, crossword-doing old baggage, morosely greeting anyone returning from a ritzy outing in Mayfair?
Rachel glances at both women: if she had to choose only one – and surely that won’t happen – it would be Fran. She has a smile in her voice, sometimes.
‘I wouldn’t want to belong,’ says Fran out of nowhere. ‘Well not in a treacly way.’
‘Before we commit, should we seek advice? Maybe a therapist, a counsellor, a life coach, a style guru?’