Mrs Gaskell and Me Read online

  ‘I dream I am in America, but it always looks like Rome,’ I say.

  He looks up. I think he might be about to smile.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ the woman says, turning over some pages. ‘I saw that quote. But I looked it up, and I’m afraid to say, in the Whitehill edition of the Letters of Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton it is given as “I dream I am in America, but it always looks like home.” ’

  I am about to correct her, to say, ‘No, actually, I think you’ll find—’ when she slides a photocopy of a page across the table to me and I see it with my own eyes. Home. Not Rome. I dream I am in America, but it always looks like home. I look up at the male academic then, expecting at least a flicker of concern, guilt, conflict, but instead he is staring at me expectantly.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘So, why Rome? What was happening in Rome that was not happening in, say, Florence, or Paris, or London, or Boston?’

  ‘Why Rome?’ I falter.

  I can see, in the corner of the room, Joyce fidgeting, twisting her hands in her lap. I’m scared that if I look at her for too long she’ll catch my eye. I look down, at the blank expanse of white table between the examiners and me.

  ‘I had to write about something,’ I say. ‘I had to pick a subject. I picked Rome.’

  1857

  The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition

  It was the summer of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, and your house was full of guests for weeks on end. When the event had first been announced the previous year, you had invited almost everyone you knew, in a fit of boredom-fuelled enthusiasm. And now everyone who had accepted was, disastrously, true to their word. They arrived. You hosted. You threw dinner after dinner, breakfast after breakfast, and spent hours on end travelling between the exhibition site near the Botanical Gardens in Old Trafford and the house on Plymouth Grove. You became an expert in the key sights of the attractions, a tour guide, like one of those unkempt Italian men who had loitered around the churches and galleries of Rome, offering knowledge in return for a few baiocchi; or like Mr Norton, who had always known the most important things, and had made it all interesting. You tried your best, for the sake of your guests, to make it interesting.

  It was always busy at the exhibition, even early in the mornings. The huge glass-and-iron building echoed with the voices of visitors, and if you stayed too long you always left with a headache.

  You took your more genteel, delicate guests all the way to the back, to the Water Colour Gallery, which had the advantage of being the most lightly visited area of the whole exhibition, and was conveniently located next door to the First Class Refreshment Rooms. Your younger visitors from London preferred the Ancient and Modern Picture Saloons, and you sent them off with Meta to see the Giottos and Botticellis and Raphaels, the Rembrandts and Van Dycks, the Hogarths and Reynolds. Then, you loitered in the central vestibule, amongst the Modern Sculpture exhibits, where you found works you had seen for the first time in Rome.

  Mr Gibson’s Hunter and his Dog was there, and his Narcissus, the youth leaning idly to stare at a reflection you could not see. There was work by Mr Hiram Powers, an American who had come to dinner at the Casa Cabrale and thrilled both you and Mr Norton by telling a story about a statue he had dreamed of as a child and then encountered with his own eyes at an archaeological dig in the Campagna. His Fisher Boy stood just by the main entryway, trailing empty nets behind him, holding up a shell to his ear. The mood around the statue was so still, the shell so solid and silent, that if you stayed near it the din of the rest of the hall seemed to fade. When your daughters came looking for you, they knew to find you there.

  You were grateful for the guests, though they exhausted you. Their constant presence meant that you and Mr Gaskell were almost never left alone together, that the coolness that had settled between you was not given a chance to crystallize into frost. When you had come home from Rome to discover the solicitor’s notice in the paper, to see your name mentioned alongside words like ‘regret’ and ‘rushed’ and ‘slander’, you had experienced a pure, vibrant kind of anger. It had almost been joyful in its fizzing, icy power. ‘I am writing as if I were in famous spirits,’ you seethed, ‘and I think I am so angry that I am almost merry in my bitterness, if you know that state of feeling.’

  You had fumed and raged at Mr Gaskell for the way he had handled the Lady Scott affair. And he, in turn, had been deathly quiet, had turned away from you and retreated into his study. He condemned you without saying a word, for writing such a rash, haphazard book and then vanishing off to Italy, swanning around the continent with your American friends, leaving him to deal with the consequences. ‘I have cried so much since I came home,’ you wrote. ‘I never needed kind words so much, and no one gives me them.’ You had tried, in weaker, sadder moments, to go to your husband, to provoke in him any kind of tenderness, but he had told you only that he had work to do, and that you had guests to entertain.

  ‘I did so try to tell the truth, & I believe now I hit as near the truth as anyone could do. And I weighed every line with all my whole power & heart.’

  Your whole power and heart were ebbing and sad and furious by turn. You wrote to your publisher, suggesting a new foreword: ‘If anybody is displeased with any statement or words in the following pages I beg leave to withdraw it, and to express my deep regret for having offered so expensive an article as truth to the public. It is very clever is it not?’

  You remembered, one morning, a few seconds after waking up, that you had discussed the Manchester Exhibition with Charlotte the year before. You had given her the dates, and told her that she and her husband would be welcome at Plymouth Grove. She had agreed, and talked excitedly about it more than once. She had been delighted by the prospect. She had wanted to see the Raphaels in particular. She had been curious about the modern painters, too, as her brother had, at one point, aspired to be an artist.

  And since then, unthinkingly, you had filled up all your guest rooms and even if she had been alive to visit, there would have been nowhere to put her. The thought caused a pang of guilt that made you turn over in bed and press your face into the pillow, to will yourself to go back to sleep for as long as you were allowed.

  It was unusual for you to wake and so rapidly fall into tragic thoughts. For months after your return, you opened your eyes thinking you were in the Casa Cabrale. It was second nature to you to slide out of bed and move to a window that, you were certain, looked out at the stone steps of the tilting street below and the sun angling down onto the Collegio Sant’Isidoro. Soon the chill in the air would encroach on the fantasy, and the dark, grey sky glowering through the glass would puncture it entirely. You sank back under the covers, pulled them right up to your face, closed your eyes, and thought of Mr Norton.

  To the lawsuits threatened by Lady Scott were added a new set, mentioned menacingly in pamphlets written by the son-in-law of the master of the school in whose care two of the Brontë children had died. In the face of these aggressions you offered to retract certain of your stronger criticisms of the school, but no sooner was this agreed than Mr Nicholls, Charlotte’s widower, became enraged and forbade you to do so. He began writing impassioned articles in the Leeds Mercury, accusing the school of far worse than you had dared in the Life. The affair seemed interminable, and in spare moments between mealtimes, when your guests were resting, you sat at your desk and began to delete the true things from your manuscript that you were not allowed to say.

  You crossed through so many written truths that summer that you began to forget the same was not possible in life. You could not draw a line through your feelings. You could not draw a line through your memories, however much they plagued you, and distracted you, and gave you false hope.

  Did you wish, sometimes, that you could draw a line through Mr Norton? Not as often as you wished for him to come to you.

  You clung to your memories of him, the way the old Catholic ladies in Rome clung to rosary beads. If you loitered long enough around
those white Roman statues at the exhibition, you half expected him to emerge from behind one, proffering some useful bit of knowledge, or a suggestion about where to have lunch. At the end of each day, in the carriage on the way home, if Meta or Marianne were with you and carrying the conversation with your guests, you allowed yourself to daydream. You imagined that you were in Italy again, that you and Mr Norton were driving out together across the Campagna, that, just as in your ghost story of the bride who dreamed of the face, your own narrative ended with Mr Norton claiming you as his own and vanishing away with you.

  And then the carriage would hit a divot in the road and your head would thud against the board, or Marianne would have a question about dinner, or a neighbour would pass in the other direction and you would be forced to stop and talk. You would breathe in smoke from a nearby factory. You would return to the world.

  I have cried so much since I came home. I never needed kind words so much, and no one gives me them. When you wrote to Mr Norton and told him what had happened, how you were, he replied and said, so simply, as though it were the easiest thing in the world, that you should come to America with him when he left at the end of July. You totted up the reasons you could not go: Mr Gaskell, when asked, refused to consider it; the girls needed supervision; the lawyer’s bills after the Life were vast and prohibitive.

  ‘I must stay here with as calm a face, and as brave a heart as I can, at any rate for the present,’ you wrote back. ‘But you can come to us.’

  He could come to you, and he should, and he promised he would.

  2015

  560 Million Years After the Big Bang

  It has been six months since I last saw Max in the flesh, and his imminent arrival in London forces me to consider my own body afresh, to scrutinize myself. I look in the mirror and try to view my reflection as he would see me. How am I different from the person I was when we were last together? I feel self-conscious about what has changed – hair is longer and in need of cutting – and what has not changed – the same three bras I wear on rotation – in equal measure.

  I pay money I do not really have to people who promise to beautify me. On the day before Max is due to arrive, I flit from the hairdresser to the nail salon to the waxing parlour like a wealthy, bored housewife, and then I buy new underwear. I want to be fresh and exciting to Max. I want to be worth the wait, and worth the journey. I am readying myself.

  This is, I know, a distraction. If I focus on my appearance, on my body hair and toenails, I don’t have to think about the state of mind of the man for whose arrival I am preparing. I don’t have to worry about the fact that his thoughts are tending, more and more, to the difficulties in our relationship; to the fact that his job hunting has so far been fruitless and he is so worried about money that he has moved back in with his parents rather than staying, permanently, with me; to the fact that when he said, that first summer in Boston, that he was not looking for a relationship right now, maybe, just possibly, that was his more honest answer; to the fact that the wedding that we had proposed take place in under eighteen months seems implausible, fantastical, a dream.

  Without my exactly noticing how, he has changed from the person who made everything OK, to the person for whom I need to make things OK. In the afternoon, I hurtle from my beautification mission to the supermarket to buy the sorts of foods Max likes that I don’t normally have: ketchup, beer, almond milk. I want to make everything easy. I want to show him that it will be all right.

  As I am walking home with the handles of shopping bags digging into my forearms, he sends a text. I have been waiting to hear from him, anxious for reassurance, and I rush to check the message. It is a link to a BBC news story about the Big Bang. Look at this. I stop in the middle of the pavement and stare at my phone.

  Stars did not appear in the sky, the article says, until 560 million years after the Big Bang. For 560 million years, the universe was dark and blank; then, slowly, stars began to form. The first stars are 100 million years younger than previously thought.

  The article comes with a video, like an old-fashioned screensaver, in which shooting stars dart towards the screen. It makes me feel seasick. I do not know what, exactly, Max is trying to say.

  That evening, in a spotless home with fully stocked fridge, I call him. Now is the time, I’ve decided, to be positive; to put to one side the angst-ridden conversations of the past few weeks, the long anthologies of Poems of the Day that I’ve been waking up to find in my inbox. Tonight, the thing to do is to remind Max, and to remind myself, that we will be happy again once he gets to London.

  He answers the Skype call. I smile.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  ‘I need to tell you something,’ he says, and my stomach turns.

  M: I have been thinking a lot about the state of my life and the impact it is having on the people I love – on you.

  N: Don’t you dare do something awful and tell me it’s for my own good.

  M: It would be though.

  N: We can talk about all of this when you get here. Just get on the plane.

  M: I’m sorry. I can’t.

  N: Can’t what?

  M: Can’t get on the plane.

  N: You’re not coming?

  M: I’m sorry.

  N: You’re not coming?

  In the morning, Holly lets herself in and finds me curled up underneath the coffee table in the living room. I am not sure when I put myself there. I haven’t slept, haven’t been able to get myself to bed, or think about Max, or think about anything that isn’t Max, and at some point overnight I must have crawled onto the floor. Holly takes my hand and tries to help me up, but my hips get wedged under the table and I can’t move.

  ‘How did you get under there?’ she asks, and I can see from her expression that she doesn’t know whether it is all right to laugh, and then moments later understands that it is not.

  She makes me coffee that I do not drink. She sits next to me on the sofa and says nothing, and then, occasionally, small, comforting, forgettable things. I’m so sorry. He’s an idiot. I’m so sorry. I stare at my immaculate fingernails, and splay out my pedicured toes, and run my fingers through my hair, which is smooth all the way through; no split ends after yesterday’s cut. If I hadn’t been awake all night, if I wasn’t dehydrated and puffy-faced from bawling, if I wasn’t deconstructed by grief, I’d be looking lovely today.

  Louise and Izra arrive, with chocolate, wine, soup. Other friends stop by to check in and contribute to the mountain of comfort food that is growing on my kitchen counter.

  It feels as though my ears are ringing, as though my hearing has been blocked: I am not in the room with the people who have come to look after me. I know they are all here, but they seem distant, faint, as though I am behind glass. Holly, Louise and Izra take shifts babysitting me, cooking, persuading me to eat, reading in silence in the corner of the room and occasionally looking over at me, saying nothing, or saying, ‘OK?’

  They listen to me repeating the same things over and over again: ‘How could he do this? Why is he doing this? How could he?’

  Later that week, when the news has reached my family, my father sends me a little blue cake, with a pattern of raindrops and umbrellas iced onto it. It is the most melancholy cake I have ever seen. My brother and his girlfriend, Alice, send a fancy tin of hot chocolate. My mother comes to London and buys me lunch, and then dessert, and then coffee, and throughout the whole meal I just cry, alarming the diners at next-door tables and the waitress, who doesn’t know where to look when she brings over plates.

  My chest hurts. My whole body hurts. My heart is broken.

  My heart is broken.

  1858

  Séance

  Harriet was hosting, but she felt as nervous as a guest at an unfamiliar house. She had spent all day preparing, readying the apartment, the drawing room, the little four-legged table and the chairs positioned around it just so. She had read as many books as she could find on the subject, to ensure the condi
tions were right: no light must enter the chamber from outside; there must be absolute silence in the rest of the house. The hearts of the participants should be open and calm. They should not bring with them anticipation, or scepticism, or disdain. The spirits sensed these things, and kept away. The petty longings and jealousies of the living had a repellent effect upon the dead.

  In her own household, recently, there had been too many petty longings and jealousies to count: the happy sanctuary for female bachelors that had comprised herself, Emma, Matthew and Charlotte was not quite happy any more. Charlotte was heartbroken: Matthew, her companion of ten years, had abandoned her after a violent row and returned to America. Worse, still, the cause of the row had been jealousy over Charlotte’s relationship with Emma, which Matthew had suspected – not wrongly, Harriet thought – of being too close. Now she, Harriet, who had once been involved with Matthew, was sharing her bed with Emma. She and Emma were wives, Harriet liked to think, though she was as troubled as Matthew had been about the way Emma and Charlotte looked at each other.

  In short, Harriet thought, as she moved around their apartment, touching the table top, the lamps, the heavy curtains, the spirits had obstacles to overcome. She tried to imagine how the room would seem through the medium’s eyes: porous, a threshold, not the stone-and-mortar backdrop to volatile domestic drama that it seemed to her. For now, it was still just a room, still the place where she and Emma and Charlotte squabbled and disagreed and loved each other and sat in the evenings to read, but soon it would be a vessel for ghosts.

  She tried as best as she could not to hope too much, and yet she spent the day in a state of emotional preparation. She caught herself that afternoon looking at her own reflection in the mirror in her studio, pulling awkward faces and playing around with her hair. She told herself that the evening would be a success if only the living guests came, and the medium performed; if there was even the slightest evidence of the supernatural at work in her drawing room. And yet her heart was giddy, excited: she was hoping against hope for a reunion.