by Janet Todd
‘Human relationships are just so much performance,’ shrugs Rachel
‘Should warn you that kind of blanket remark gets up Fran’s nose,’ chuckles Annie.
As Tamsin’s digital executor, Harmony has given the Black Diva material to Thomas, who’s crafted it into a blog ending with Tamsin among the tombs of San Michele. He spends more time in London than he used to, feigning monogamous love until it becomes real again: then his long-suffering wife no longer need threaten to leave Thomas coping with three children. Yet, whenever he’s on a train and sometimes in the car if the back seat is empty of small bodies, he finds Tamsin’s thighs wriggling through his sinuses. He crosses and uncrosses his legs.
*
Fran’s in Norfolk. The cottage is on the market, but without a ‘For Sale’ sign on the roadside. Who except joggers and horses pass by? She’s touched up windowsills with fresh paint and replanted outdoor pots.
Into black binbags she’s stuffed her attempts at writing. The activity satisfies more than pressing Delete.
For a day or two before rubbish collection, the binbags might be dragged back down the newly laid brick path, then bashfully repossessed. But they aren’t. (Had she meant proper business, she’d have made a bonfire like Cassandra or Sylvia Plath. Or John Murray burning Byron’s memoirs – might these have said something of Shelley’s dead children? They can’t all have been about scabrous sex.)
A house without a past is more saleable; yet the cottage languishes. Not in the choicest location, it must be viewed to best advantage before sugar-beet harvest, when fields aren’t being sprayed with chemicals, when hawthorn foams over the grass or cowslips shine and birds sing merrily from the mossed roof. It saddens Fran that a place she’s valued attracts no one else’s love.
Are Agafia and she eccentric because they care for the tundra and dull level fields where normal people crave Caribbean beaches?
Once in a bleak 4 a.m. mood Fran catches herself almost wishing the place would burn down, taking with it her encroaching ‘stuff’. Never with her inside.
‘I used to pray our house would burn,’ Annie’d said, ‘so Mother and I could bolt and leave Zach to the flames.’
‘Burning to death?’
‘Yes, well, going out the back anyway and not coming home, ever.’
We’ve lost men and learnt a lot. Fran sighs.
You do know that when Elizabeth Bennet announces she never knew herself till she’d read Mr Darcy’s letter, there’s … Oh no, groans Fran, not irony again.
Not quite, but points of view may err. Time shuffles off every mood and perception. Nothing is finally learnt or defined, certainly not the self.
Fran expels breath loudly enough for even a shadow to hear.
The sun steps out so brightly it clatters right through the kitchen window and lights up the cleaned but smudged stove. A visceral, intrusive, wonderful sun.
Goodness, says Fran, thinking her exclamation right for once, how I shall miss this place! Just agricultural tenements gentrified and painted, not even pargeted, but still.
Neighbours too. The Reeves in the crooked farmhouse: she’d helped their girl with English essays when she twice failed GCSE; in return she’s had home-baked cakes, string beans, plum tomatoes and beetroot, and been invited to the Guy Fawkes’ party round an enormous sparking bonfire. The Lambs and the Riches, and Jenny from the new houses near Waitrose. They drop in from time to time, chat over tea, and stay that bit too long. Dave, too, who does casual work clearing drains and removing jackdaw nests from chimneys.
Such luxury to live here.
There’s nothing like staying at home, for real comfort, announces Jane Austen.
Mostly it’s the plants and creatures. The copper beech by the gate – stealing sun off the unused front door where otherwise she might sit to drink a morning coffee – opens soft tawny leaves, unfurling gold, then bronze; the pear tree serving mushy yellow fruit. The tactile greenness, the quiet mossiness on roof and walls, the fungus in soft clefts, even the absconded Jeoffry, who turned khaki to disguise himself against the foliage. Moles, badgers, hedgehogs in hibernacles, foxes, hares, beetles, worms, bats (not ‘as blind as’ after all), secret seeing through eyes myopic or hyperopic, compound or simple, binocular or monocular, catching infra-red or ultraviolet, open before birth like the leveret. Rabbits, squirrels eating the tulips, the bushy-tailed fox prowling for hens and human rubbish (never threatened by hunting dogs). The dull mallard beside her flashy drake, tadpoles and sticklebacks, newts – or ewts as they more memorably used to be – in the pond.
‘Ewts,’ Fran says aloud.
Not all always unmissable, not all ‘real comfort’, not when winter wind grows malicious, ditches overflow, gutters and drainpipes gurgle, and long algae make the pond green as gangrene. Grass freezes. Rats and mice think to come in from the cold. Then you may want human company.
If and when you do move, says Jane Austen, you should leave Agafia behind.
She never needed me.
‘It’s dangerous being a loner,’ Annie says yet again in an unexpected phone call. ‘It does real damage.’
She’s thinking of herself: it’s not a general truth.
Fran opens her mouth to speak, then closes it, warned by her Author’s honest, kindly face. Remember, if things go untowardly one day, they mend the next. There will be little rubs and disappointments, but we find comfort somewhere.
Fran brushes prudence aside, ‘Are you saying I shouldn’t be there?’ she says.
Jane Austen sighs at the foot-shooting.
Before Fran can protest idea and idiom, Annie answers, ‘I think you’d struggle – and so would we.’
Stung by ‘we’, she should respond, ‘But I will try.’ The words don’t come. ‘Yeah,’ she says.
Affability and condescension, murmurs Jane Austen. My Lady Catherine, your Annie …
Fran faces a bitter day, unsolaced by blackbird, beech tree, newts or the lovely word ‘akrasia’. In the evening she’s once more on her prosthesis, the magic phone link with Annie and Rachel.
She raises a second worry to dampen the first: ‘I don’t like to intrude, but I have very little pension and haven’t yet sold the cottage.’
‘Should say,’ says Rachel – and to Fran she seems speaking from an immense high-ceilinged hall – ‘I have enough money. But nothing’s secure. Just so you guys know. There’s a brother, I don’t mention him a lot, but he exists and with a trio of unbalanced kids and two ex-wives to support.’
‘Too much,’ laughs Annie, filling the triangular lines, ‘you are our Aunt Betsey Trotwood, Pip’s Magwitch, Jane Eyre’s uncle from Madeira. I knew you were OK, I didn’t know you were rich. Could we accept imbalance?’
‘Not asking you to. It would be an arrangement of shares. Not mega-rich. I just mean we can have a place big enough for our eccentricities.’
‘I’d feel guilty,’ says Fran.
‘She’s objecting before accepting,’ says Annie. ‘I know Fran. She’s leaping into this.’
The sadness of ‘we’ evaporates. Fran smiles through her polished window at a rabbit’s rump about to scurry into the undergrowth near where Jane Austen is wagging an elongated finger.
Quantum entanglement, says the Author.
33
The cottage has had an offer, so Annie and Rachel make the trek up to Norfolk for a last time. A smell of fertilizer attacks Rachel’s nose and Annie sniffles at something natural and grating from the garden.
Fran suggests tea and Chelsea buns or Chablis and olives to her guests. She’d prefer the former but knows the latter might make agreement easier though it’s only five in the afternoon. She hopes the wine is approved. It’s way more expensive than her usual plonk.
‘Do you think Thomas will visit?’
‘Dunno. We’d have to cook him tofu and lentils,’ says Annie. ‘Maybe he’ll come to talk of Tamsin – and his career.’
‘It’s an odd idea. Did we women have “careers”?’
‘Living room,’ says Rachel, thinking of Sweetpapers; one much praised story turned on the semantics of domestic space.
‘Drawing room,’ says Annie
‘The parlour then.’
For all their rules and semi-serious requirements, they’ve resolved on only one thing: to look down at themselves with unfiltered gaze if needs be, but to stick with soft focus when the eye travels out. A good resolution.
Hope is a Christian virtue, whispers Jane Austen.
Fran smiles as she washes down her Chelsea bun with the remains of the Chablis.
As the years pile up behind, if indeed they do in this ensemble, light will darken for all of them, none being young; each will have less and less to clean about themselves and perhaps take less trouble with what remains.
A bit mawkish, interrupts the Author. Cowper makes the point decorously:
not a year but pilfers as he goes
Some youthful grace that age would gladly keep,
A tooth or auburn lock.
But Fran’s incorrigible. They’ll ignore (with difficulty) the snot, the dribble, the twitch, the sag, the stained blouse, the rumpled flesh, the lax bladder, the wavering bowels, the compromised brain, the preoccupied look of the aching, the knowledge it can all only get worse. What courage old age requires!
Not yet of course, absolutely not yet. However, best be prepared. Let them think these things ahead of time: no need to say them, though Rachel being American and with a greater tendency to spade-calling (with vocabulary to support it) will sometimes declare the obvious, making Fran laugh nervously.
There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that.
‘I’ve always thought about death,’ says Fran. ‘I’ve got asthmatic lungs. It’s an exciting disease, you never know if the breath will stop.’
‘I have allergies,’ says Rachel, ‘I don’t find them exciting.’
‘Lungs are the self.’
‘My mother has asthma,’ continues Rachel. ‘Or does whenever life falls on top of her. Her rasping breath shattered any argument against her faked ailments. When my brother wanted to experience puberty, he was upstaged by Mother and her supercharged breath. That was the only clever thing he ever said.’
‘Hypochondriasis was a disease causing belly-ache, anxiety and obsession. The sufferer needed stimulation and agreeable company to recover,’ says Annie. She delivers snippets of history promiscuously now she’s deprived of respectful students.
‘Mother always talked of her body parts, so they could each be separately and expensively served.’
‘In some gentry circles it wasn’t done to describe any parts. A maid dressing Mrs Piozzi’s hair burst out laughing at the idea a lady said her stomach ached.’
They fall silent, Annie thinking of Mrs Piozzi’s wish for cows’ milk in Venice. She exhales and says, ‘Will we be too competitive for communal living? The eighteenth-century commune Millennium Hall was run by do-gooding women, not ones who tried to excel at yoga. Absurd, but it’s a character defect. What do I do?’
‘Avoid yoga?’ says Fran.
‘Be stern with yourself,’ says Rachel. ‘If you get handed a coffee mug second on three consecutive mornings, retire to your room and do private postures with thoracic breathing.’
‘Or get cross and protest, that’d be healthier,’ says Fran.
‘It wouldn’t because you’d both be nice about it, and I’d feel ashamed.’
‘Yeah, well, we’d hand you the mug first next time.’
‘I’d resent that too.’
‘For sure you’re unsuited to community, Annie. But you’re in and you make a mean guacamole with tabasco sauce.’
‘We should have slate tops,’ says Annie briskly. ‘They wipe down.’
Fran and Rachel glance at her. Annie, always centre stage: why not? No one wants to live with cold eyes.
*
‘Where do we go?’ begins Rachel. ‘Wet Wales is out, much as Fran wants it – well as long as she’s thwarted.’
‘Actually,’ says Fran, ‘I’d quite like to live in Ambridge.’
‘Easy. Add a C and we stay in Cambridge.’
‘No, Cambridge is Tamsin. Wherever we settle, we’ll plant tulips and anemones for her, she’s always Mayday.’
‘Sentimental but true,’ says Annie, abruptly aware she doesn’t want to stay a moment longer in her town. Why be vindictive towards a place that’s fed and clothed her so many years and whose old-stone beauty still stuns her?
Something to do with Paul and ‘happy heart’? We won’t go there. ‘I can’t take the country,’ she says, ‘my eyes stream.
You’ve seen, Fran.’
‘Nor I mean streets.’
‘Oxford?’
‘More snobbish than Cambridge.’
‘Cotswolds? Frosted hips and haws, medieval clay, lambs and catkins, very fashionable. All rural trappings, converted chapels serving lattes and avocado toast.’
Annie gives an artificial cough, ‘Remember, Rachel and I need a library.’
‘Need?’
‘Want – with heating and squishy chairs – and books. How about London? Near the Tube, maybe a park with ponds.’
‘By the sea,’ says Fran.
‘I’d be out of place in a resort,’ says Annie.
‘The very place to be out of place. Tourists make one think one belongs, knowing where loos are.’
Crankhumdunberry? suggests Jane Austen reverting to childhood. Pammydiddle?
‘The house will be new to all of us, so derelict we animate it by decorating from top to bottom,’ says Rachel. She’s assuming leadership in the search, having less emotional investment in English earth but (potentially) more financial. ‘Got it: a place near fields, water, people, emptiness, libraries, cafés, the Tube.’ She pauses for smiles. ‘Each will have her room, a necessary sense of ownership. Shared spaces will be neutral – but not grey, ecru or cream.’
Annie shrugs. ‘No fear of soullessness. Leave a scarf or smeared wineglass and a perfect room’s tacky.’
‘A house from birth,’ Rachel continues, ‘not a fancied-up barn or Manhattan-type loft-conversion – a house intended for what it is, in unashamed bricks or stone.’
‘A surprised house, sheepishly tangled in Virginia creeper and wisteria.’
Annie’s contribution to the new life will be uncompetitive yoga in the early morning, so she’ll become placid and ruminative later in the day. She’ll be released from peer pressure and, though she keeps this from Fran, relinquish the need ever again to pretend she likes Jane Austen’s banal and overrated books – insufficient fibre she’s always thought. She’ll loaf with rubbish novels and the whacky Booker shortlist if she wishes.
As for Rachel: who sees what expatriates intend for their future? Even the planets don’t know. One day her companions will read her pseudonymous short stories – witty, unsettled and addictive, the Washington Post called them – and understand a little more about her. Well, as a writer.
Fran determines to construct a new personality. Less apprehensive of exclusion now, she aims to speak in a thoughtful, slightly guarded way. It will take practice. As she moves towards a new decade, she’ll stop drawing attention to age – losing even the residual hope of the response, ‘You don’t look …’
Noting one or two omissions in Fran’s plan of reformation, Jane Austen says, If I come, I shall – as you once suggested – remain in the garden, refreshing myself with the fruits of others’ labour. Wherever we are, the bells of the Church of England will ring out cheerily.
Fine by me, says Fran, though more plangent these days.
She packs up her editions of the sacred works in their different formats: reprinted paperbacks in new covers with bonneted girls looking through saucy modern eyes; annotated hardbacks with Hugh Thomson illustrations; comic ver
sions of Pride and Prejudice.
You’ll look well out there by the hollyhocks. You can serve expensive teas on rosy plates when the sky’s blue. Celebrity has responsibilities.
I am no enthusiast of hollyhocks, replies Jane Austen, a Victorian taste. I will need pinks, sweet Williams, columbines, cornflowers, Cowper’s ivory-pure syringa, his laburnum rich in streaming gold. Fruits and flowers, she murmurs again, flowers and fruits.
Moved by Shelley’s gardens of amaranth and asphodel, his unseen sweetly singing, sad skylark, if she wanders among Fran’s flowerbeds Rachel may tame any jumble with a hint at colour-coding – but she’ll be no Henry Tilney imposing taste on Fran’s myopic eye. Home is collaboration.
‘Our time is past,’ says Fran, already back-sliding. She sits sipping white wine in Annie’s house, perfect and ready for wide-angled sale shots.
A little exasperated, Rachel responds, ‘That’s giving too much to what doesn’t exist. The now’s the thing. Our time’s inevitably now.’
‘Sounds a bit alternative,’ says Fran, feeling so warm towards Rachel her face reddens.
‘Shelley had a ring on which was engraved il buon temp verra,’ says Annie. ‘Come on, guys, we all know the answer to happy life: focus on trifles.’
‘Watch grass grow, be overtaken by clover and moss, listen to a house groan and moan.’
‘Find content in the paltry.’
‘See a pigeon’s sheen.’
‘Make commonplace miraculous.’
‘Shucks,’ laughs Rachel – she’d recently used the exclamation in a story set in 1955. ‘Do we have the shoulders for it?’
‘We’ll bring our solitude along,’ says Annie with such gentleness the others smile.
‘And authority?’ asks Fran. ‘Will we divvy up duties? In the Jane Austen household one becomes the housekeeper, another the caregiver.’ She leaves off the creator, the author, the genius.
‘I don’t know about caring,’ says Annie, ‘but I can organise.’