by Janet Todd
‘And cope with our inefficiency?’ laughs Fran. ‘Would you feel the impulse to criticise?’
‘I’d repress it. I was trained in repression. I forgot the lesson but can recap.’
‘If we call laziness sloth, we can luxuriate in it. Idleness slows time and fends off ageing.’
‘Self-pity?’
‘There’ll be a drinks cabinet. We can retire when pricked by shards of devouring memory.’
‘Ah, we can talk in quotes as well as metaphors.’
But not adverbs, thinks Rachel. ‘We must have a table for an ice bucket,’ she says.
The strange vision halts Fran, then she chuckles, ‘Absolutely, non-negotiable.’
‘A painted birdbath for Fran, handcrafted by refugees,’ says Annie. ‘Rachel will do the good cheer. She’s had an easy life, why shouldn’t she be cheerful?’ She stops, remembering the scene on the Lido.
Rachel recalls those lunches in the Danieli, the deeper resentments of childhood.
No reason to eschew a regular course of cheerful orderliness, says Jane Austen.
Orderly cheerfulness? Fran blushes to find herself correcting her Author.
‘And you, Annie? What’s essential beside the bath?’
‘Nothing. We’ll all be displaced, that’s the point. We’ll have a shed for things never unpacked like family photos, heirloom tablecloths, domestic detritus – and a bench to sit on for contemplating the closed crates.’
‘You can leave things behind too. Bits of yourself, I guess,’ says Rachel. She’s a little uneasy: the jewellery inherited from her grandmother is lodged in a New York bank.
Fran doubts this, nothing of her left in Nigeria nor, she’s discovered, in Elan Valley, though she’d breathed its air deeply. She’s where she is. And yet, thinking again, she sees traces in the warm ham-smelling kitchen by the Long Mynd – she’s brushed the earth there – and maybe by reed-edged Norfolk ditches.
She expects sometimes to pine for her floating cottage, especially on clear fresh harebell mornings. Then she’ll settle for equable low spirits till enough contentment returns.
Annie will smile bitterly when she recalls her artisan house, half its value swallowed by Paul and ‘happy heart’. Perhaps because she often inhabits New York in her stories, Rachel will regret nothing. None feels amputated by moving on.
They see a house on a street with camouflage trees. Like a Mediterranean villa in exile, thinks Rachel, who secretly fancies a stone hideout in the South of France. But one alien place is as good as another, so she doesn’t protest. It would be tactless since she’s paying the lion’s share. She’s glad when Annie and Fran reject it as lacking ‘nuance’ – Annie’s word.
Waiting a little longer, they find somewhere more suitable, combining in various degrees the desired privacies, a garden sufficient for mistakes in placing foxgloves, hollyhocks and snake’s head fritillaries, near enough to city sounds for Annie to breathe trafficked air in the evening and sip a decent cappuccino in the morning, a library not so distant, and a sense of water trickling somewhere. Rachel orders an expensive wooden swing set for the bottom of the lawn, so Thomas’s girls will play happily when enticed to visit.
Fran grins. ‘If he comes, he’ll see three ageing women acting out a 1970s’ Women’s Lib refuge.’ She’d have preferred a homemade high swing hung from the apple-tree bough to swish a child over tall grass. A grown-up too.
Rachel finds the tie between Thomas and Annie so interesting she’s based a short story on it, set in Brooklyn. When, much later, the others discover this, there are words, then mutterings of betrayal, questions as to other depictions of her housemates.
Expecting the éclaircissement – she’s increasingly praised for catching the zeitgeist for the older woman – Rachel will be easy in her answers: she’s attacked nothing in them that had a claim to reputation, though she may have picked up an (endearing) foible or two.
Jane Austen approves. Claims to reputation are the dearest to the heart, they are what beauty is to the trivial, she announces.
Rather an eighteenth-century viewpoint, Fran whispers back.
But as long as Rachel doesn’t stand on claims of ‘simple honesty’, she’ll forgive. Annie needs more cajoling.
Rachel will sometimes be in her room on the phone to Miranda (her agent), discussing stories that mustn’t track her down, not yet; Annie and Fran will have time together, looking or whatever. When her eyes aren’t fixed on Annie, Fran sees that what she’d once thought a dilapidation in Rachel is mind poking through a cosmetically prepped face.
Occasionally Annie will savour a smell of cigar smoke, a heavy scent that Fran associates with burning autumn leaves, and Rachel with smooth thunderous evenings in Manhattan.
Only Fran feels the guilt of comfort, a yearning for a little dereliction, a little austerity. She’s kept back some money from the disappointing cottage sale, just in case. Will Annie be loyal if her wants change, her friendship become less transactional, less a compact of convenience? Does either of them really know Rachel?
For now, she’ll plant the new garden and be saddened her efforts aren’t quite appreciated. If there’s no proper pond, there’s at least a hollow where, after rain, a trembling skin appears. She’s no time for water features.
‘None of us has ever swum in a river naked,’ remarks Annie.
‘I have,’ says Fran.
‘Me too,’ says Rachel, ‘bliss, in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the water brown and most flattering.’
Truly, says Percy Bysshe, trailing his expensive blue jacket in the wet grass, a garden invites me to be elsewhere, see beyond land and water, the loveliness of fabled Eden …
Jane Austen smells gassy hyperbole and delicately holds her noble nose.
Fran comes out and moves the geniuses towards the far end of the lot where holly and briars flourish and overhanging trees make it almost always dark.
Is this a way to treat defenceless Authors?
Agafia was born in a hollowed-out pine washtub. She’ll be thinking where to die in readiness for the posthumous Rapture. Please God, not in a distant hospital with cameras clicking. But she has no more control over her death and beatification than Jane Austen.
‘If one of us dies suddenly – as can happen – what will you do?’ asks Fran.
‘Nothing,’ says Annie. ‘We’re not family.’
It turns out they are, in a way. Just before they’ve time to feel truly settled, if ever, Covid-19 arrives. It’s unheeded in reckless Westminster while it floats through homes and care homes with its spikes like one of Annie’s yellow yoga balls. Now it seems they’re a ‘household’ and will be locked down together, with a yard full of authors. How lucky is that?
One may end in fantasy, in one’s own or another’s book, remarks Jane Austen turning her deadpan face to her companion. She gazes through the Victorian illustration at upland pastures. Life’s impossible otherwise.
Of course, dear Madam. We are both Romantics. Shelley smiles his sunny smile and looks up to the bright stars, beaming in daylight.
Illustrations
Hedgehog. Alamy.
Jane Austen’s Writing Desk. (Courtesy Jane Austen’s House, Chawton.)
Jane Austen. Cassandra Austen. National Portrait Gallery (NPG 3630).
River Wye. William Gilpin. Observations on the River Wye. page 20D. 2nd ed. London: R. Blamire, 1789.
The Vale of Nantgwilt, A Submerged Valley. R. Eustace Tickell, 1894. Sketches on pp. 92, 104, 117.
Jane Austen. Cassandra Austen c. 1804. Private collection.
Horses. Giulio Falzoni. In author’s possession.
Tintown. Powys Digital History Project, Powys County Archives R/D/CL/1/20 and 21.
Byron’s Room in Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice. The Stapleton Collection, Bridgeman Images.
Lobster Claw and Palette. Thomas Bewick Description of Water Birds, London, Longman and Co. 1821. p. 43.
Illustration and title page of Five Go Adventuring Again. Enid Blyton
. Alamy.
The Funeral of Shelley. Louis Edward Fournier, 1879. (Courtesy National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery.)
Hugh Thomson illustration from Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford (1898).
Where there is no attribution, picture or photograph is author’s own.
Acknowledgements
Denied coffee and croissants in the library and bookshop cafés, in the March 2020 Lockdown I turned to writing a novel using only what I had to hand: memories, photos and leftover bits from earlier projects. Three female characters entered and stayed in the house over the next unsocial months.
As millions of readers have also found, Jane Austen’s novels live in the head; I have allowed them and their author to appear, in part responding to and in part directing the thoughts of my most voluble character. Words attributed to this figment are sometimes from Austen’s work, but not always.
In 2007 I published a biography called Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle. This ended with Fanny’s suicide in 1816, so I had unfinished business with the poet, who did not play an heroic part in this story of death and emotional carelessness. My biography came out at the same time as Ann Wroe’s lyrical appreciation, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself. I have given a little of its enthusiasm to two of my characters, Rachel and Thomas, who between them describe pursuing Shelley through two pivotal moments in his life.
I am grateful to many people who have generously donated time and information. Nora Crook and Mathelinda Nabugodi put me right on some Shelley details (errors are of course mine, some intentional), and John Gardner led me to appreciate the poet as engineer. I have chatted about Jane Austen with so many friends over so many years it’s impossible to recall them all, but I must mention Linda Bree, Diana Birchall, John Wiltshire, Peter Sabor and the late Deirdre Le Faye (I doubt I’d have dared dramatize Jane Austen even as a shade had that great and exacting scholar still been alive).
Oddbjørn Sørmoen, John Millerchip and the Revd Malcolm Bradshaw gave me information on Protestant tombs in Venice and Anna Rosa Scrittori of Università Ca’ Foscari provided material on Italian convents. I found Agafia Lykova on the web in the Siberian Times and on the YouTube video ‘Hermit Agafia Lykova’. I already had notes on a few of the Radnorshire Transactions, but information about Elan Valley, its houses and local anecdotes, comes from the Powys digital history project and the excellent website https://www.elanvalley.org.uk/discover/reservoirs-dams/lost-valleys. I prize a second-hand copy of The Vale of Nantgwilt A Submerged Valley by R. Eustace Tickell; at last I have found a way to insert it into a novel.
The Shelley quotations in the text are from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (2002) and The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (1965). For biographical material on Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley I consulted The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, eds Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (1995), Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), John Worthen, Shelley Drowns (2019) and Iris Origo, The Last Attachment: The Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli (1949). Where Austen is quoted correctly – rarely the case – the quotation is from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (2005–8). Scattered sayings and snippets of prose and poetry lodged in my bookish characters’ minds come from Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, John Clare, William Cowper, Thomas Gray, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman and Derek Mahon, as well as George Eliot, Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Mary Wollstonecraft, Muriel Spark, W.S. Gilbert, Henry Adams and Thorold Rogers.
I am grateful to the Zooming groups that supported sanity during Lockdowns; also, to Newnham College, Cambridge, for keeping its gardens open and its flowerbeds unusually stocked with lettuce and tomatoes. I owe thanks to Derek Hughes, Mary Colombi and Nancy Steiber for reading the manuscript. While the characters and events are fictional, the amateur photographs printed here are my own. Since they were largely unlabelled, some may seem a little random, with, for example, seasons confused, but I hope that most complement the text. I owe huge gratitude to Art Petersen of Alaska, who so kindly took time from editing his mammoth biography of Mollie Walsh to help make these photographs and other illustrations suitable for printing. Sarah Wasley, Rosemary Gray and Patty Rennie knocked the book into shape and Jeremy Hopes designed the lovely green cover. Thanks to all of them.
I owe most gratitude to Katherine Bright-Holmes, editor, advisor, encourager and friend.
A selection of Janet Todd’s previous works
The Revolutionary Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York: Columbia University Press, 2000; London: Bloomsbury eBook, 2013)
Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict (London: Viking, 2003); Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters and the Making of a Modern Nation (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004)
Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Jane Austen in Context, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle (London: Profile Books; Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2007)
Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Times, Her Novels (London: André Deutsch, 2014)
Lady Susan Plays the Game (London: Bloomsbury, eBook 2013; paperback, 2016)
A Man of Genius (London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2016) Aphra Behn: A Secret Life (London: Fentum Press, 2017)
Radiation Diaries: Cancer, Memory and Fragments of a Life in Words (London: Fentum Press, 2018)
Jane Austen’s Sanditon: With an Essay by Janet Todd (London: Fentum Press, 2019)
Don’t You Know There’s a War On? (London: Fentum Press, 2020)