Mrs Gaskell and Me Read online

  Somehow, after the incident in the car park, Max and I salvaged a friendship. We spent our final weeks in Boston working on a pilot script for a TV show about a nineteenth-century music-hall performer loosely based on the life of a real musician called George Leybourne. The script entertained us endlessly, and we spent hours composing lyrics to music-hall songs. It was an easy distraction from the awkwardness of our previous encounters. We went out for dinner at Lineage a lot, and to see films at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, and often we would text each other last thing and first thing: goodnight, good morning. We were, in the disapproving words of my friend Holly, ‘dry dating’, and it was fun – so much fun that for a while I wondered whether this was, after all, enough. He never once mentioned the knee-patting, the email, and whenever I, towards the end of an evening spent sharing a bottle of wine, looked as though I might be about to bring it up, he steered the conversation away from it so expertly that I lost momentum and forgot what I had been about to say.

  I was persuaded by Max’s tact: why should the fact that I was in love with him stop us being friends? Why shouldn’t I have dinner with this beautiful, well-dressed former lawyer who gave up his job to become a writer and made me laugh and drove me home and loved all the same books as me, and who wrote quiet, immaculate short stories about sad bachelors that were always a perfect balance of hilarious and gut-wrenching?

  Except that now I lived in London and he lived in Paris and I was beginning my Ph.D. and he was writing in cafes and wandering by the Seine and life, in short, had moved on. Being in love with Max was all well and good, but it did seem to preclude being in love with anyone else – someone who might, if I was lucky, actually love me back – and so, when Max invited me to stay with him in Paris for a few days, I accepted, but I told myself it was time to make the declaration.

  I can’t be your friend any more, I was going to say. I have to fall out of love with you, and if I’m going to do that, I can’t be your friend.

  I would spend the weekend with Max; we would go to the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower and climb up the steps to the Sacré-Cœur and it would be lovely, but it would also, though he wouldn’t know it at first, be a goodbye. At some point before I left, I’d explain why I could never see him again, and it would be sickening and I would probably feel numb and empty and horribly lonely for weeks, but it was necessary. At some point in the future I would wake up in London and realize that I was all right again. I would be ready to start afresh.

  The train slows as it reaches Paris, sliding past the grey tower blocks of the banlieu, between banks of graffiti. The sky above the buildings is soft and dense. The sniffer sniffs again, and the peek-a-boo child begins jumping up and down, shouting, ‘On est là! On est là!’ and as I stand to take down my case from the luggage rack I feel unsteady on my feet, and wish the journey could go on longer. The glass roof of the Gare du Nord extends over the carriage like a grasping hand. The train crawls on, and then stops.

  Air outside: crisp. Sound of the station: echoey and deep behind the clatter and rumbling of suitcase wheels. The sniffer: vanished into the crowd. My heart: nervously arrhythmic. At the end of the platform, behind a barrier, surrounded by the expectant smiles of people waiting for other passengers from the London train: Max’s face.

  1857

  Manchester to Rome

  Manchester to Dover, Dover to Calais, Calais to Paris. Three nights at the Hôtel des Missions Étrangères on the Rue du Bac (drizzly, chilly) and then onwards. Train pulling out of the Paris station. Chatter of your daughters. Thrum of the wheels on the just-opened railway line, everything newly painted, gleaming, bright: the furthest south that you had ever been. Dijon. Lyon. Avignon. Marseille: another overnight stay – Hôtel de l’Orient on the Rue Grignon, wide shuttered windows and the street outside lit up in the morning with sharp, clear sunshine – and then off again. After six days of travelling, you set sail, at last, for Italy.

  ‘I want just, if I can, to leave England on the day of publication of my book,’ you had written to Emelyn Story, your American friend who lived in Rome. And you did exactly that. You were frantic, getting everything in place for your Life of Charlotte Brontë to enter the world on time, and when you were certain you could pull it off you wrote again: ‘We are really and truly coming to Rome!!!!!!’ You would spend three months in the city, leaving Mr Gaskell to his sermons in Manchester, and taking with you your two eldest girls, Marianne, twenty-three, and Meta, twenty.

  You hurled your biography of Charlotte into the world like a grenade, and ran away just as fast as you could. You did not look back as you boarded the steam liner at Marseille, to see what chaos you were leaving in your wake.

  ‘Shall we truly see Rome?’ you asked Emelyn. ‘I don’t believe it. It is a dream! I shall never believe it, and shall have to keep pinching myself!’

  You stood on the deck of the Hellespont and looked forwards at the blue sea, the blue horizon. To your left: the gleaming bulk of the Château d’If, squatting confidently on white rocks.

  ‘Oh, it’s just like in The Count of Monte Cristo!’ said Marianne.

  Meta snorted. ‘It isn’t at all.’

  ‘No,’ you said, quietly. ‘In the book he calls it a “gloomy fortress” but really it’s quite cheerful to look at.’

  ‘It’s hardly a “black and frowning rock”,’ said Meta, gesturing at the white island, which shone as the sun hit it.

  ‘I don’t mean like in the book,’ Marianne said. ‘I just mean, it’s in the book. It’s from the book.’

  ‘Lock me up there any day,’ said Meta. ‘It would be like a holiday for ever.’

  ‘It’s so pretty,’ you said. ‘It’s so bright.’

  Everything was suddenly cheerful. Manchester’s grime, the constant smoke and grease of the factories, peeled away from your skin. With each wave the ship broke, the house on Plymouth Grove was further off and felt that way: irrelevant, as though it belonged to someone else, a different Mrs Gaskell. You had many versions of yourself, competing for attention and dominance: wife, mother, philanthropist, gossip, writer. On the ship, you somehow left all of them behind. You were forty-six years old, but devoted to childishness. You were living in a world you had only read about: The Count of Monte Cristo, Byron, Corinne. You were inside your most precious books, and everything was gleaming.

  In Manchester, sunset was a brown tinge behind the brown smoke heaving from the chimneys. On the ocean, now, it was a performance, as though the sky and sea and even the birds conspired to bring you pleasure: you sat with your daughters on deck and gaped at the colours overhead, and the way the water sucked the pinks and oranges down into itself, and how, later, in the darkness, small flowers of phosphorescence bloomed in the waves and moved in strange swirls, like murmurations of starlings, ‘like the Milky Way,’ Marianne said. In the morning, if you got up early, which you never normally liked to do but seemed to manage at sea, you saw it all again in reverse: the darkness falling away and in its place an optimistic flag of dawn colours.

  You were sitting out on deck drinking coffee and gazing at the sky when there was a thud – you felt it in your own stomach – and a shudder that started in the very heart of the ship and continued until you were shaking, too, and Meta was trembling and looked at you wide-eyed and sounded so young, as though she was only ten years old, when she said, ‘Mama? What was that?’

  People scrambled up from their cabins half-dressed, unsteady. The steerage passengers emerged, too, talking fast in foreign languages, gesturing at something beneath their feet. A woman in only her nightgown, clutching a baby and squinting in the light. Tides of steam rising from below, obscuring everything, and then an eerie stillness as the ship stopped moving. You waited. Suddenly you were aware of the sounds of the waves as they slapped the sides of the ship. The moment of sinking, of being sucked under the water, felt inevitable.

  And it was now, in this nauseating pause, that you realized that you truly had believed in Rome, had not only believed but
relied on it. You had been miserable in Manchester. Your friend had died. You had done your best to write a book, a good book, and everybody had complained about it, and the one hopeful thing through all of it had been that when it was done you were going to Rome. Were you really going to drown, never having seen the Colosseum?

  You were afraid for yourself, but more so for your girls, who were looking at you as though you could, singlehandedly, keep the ship afloat. You reverted to being a mother and clucked at them that everything would be perfectly fine. When the Hellespont had retreated safely to Marseilles, its boiler burst but not wrecked, you pretended you had never doubted it.

  You did not drown. Instead, you waited for another ship, more seaworthy. You sent a man off to telegraph the Storys and let them know not to panic when the Hellespont failed to arrive. Later, you, your daughters and your luggage were packed onto a little boat that ferried you across the bay to the Oran, and as you rearranged yourself in the new cabin and took stock of the day, it was lodged in your heart with a sudden and fierce determination: you were going to Rome if it killed you. Not a dream, not a wish, not a story in a book. Really, truly, Rome.

  Stumbling off the ship at Civitavecchia, you tried to detect whether, just by breathing the air, you could tell you were in Italy. There was a tremendous fuss about passports and visas, endless queuing and shuffling of papers, and then you were told you had been waiting in the wrong line and to go to the back of a different one. One of Marianne’s boxes was lost and you had to send a boy to find it. Perhaps it was your fate to be interminably delayed. The box reappeared and with it half a dozen boys, none of them the one you had sent, all claiming responsibility for finding it and demanding payment. Then, at last, the passports were stamped, the correct boy rewarded, and you were waved through.

  You drove all day towards Rome and grew so tired of looking out for the dome of St Peter’s that you dozed and when, suddenly, you saw it, the basilica was up close and looming.

  ‘Look! The Colonnade!’

  ‘The Vatican!’

  ‘St Angelo!’

  You knew each monument, each building, from books.

  So this was Rome. Inside it, amongst the ruins and monuments and art, were the people with whom you would fall, generally and liberally, in love; and inside it was one person with whom you would fall, specifically, in love.

  In the first category there was, at the heart of everything, Mr William Wetmore Story: American sculptor, poet, polymath, who threw wild, wonderful parties and put on plays in his own parlour in which he was the star. He was always busy, always about to execute some new plan that would, he assured you, change the cultural worlds of England and America for ever. He claimed to speak more languages than you knew existed, though you only heard his English, French, Italian and schoolboy Latin. He told stories about the tourists who visited his studio that made you weep with laughter: how precisely he skewered the pretensions of the amateur art critic, how beautifully he acknowledged, with a glint in his eyes and smile, that the subject of the send-up was himself, and you, and all your friends, too. You had asked Mr Story if he and Emelyn would put you up for your first few days in Rome, just until you found your own lodgings, but you had hoped he might offer to have you the whole time. You were not disappointed. The Storys insisted. Their home, Casa Cabrale on the Via Sant’Isidoro, became yours.

  Next: funny little Harriet Hosmer, also a sculptor. She was a squat American, who dressed like a man and rode her horse like a man and refused to notice anyone who was shocked by it. She made statues of giant, towering women with faces that glowered, and once you had seen them, you looked more closely at Harriet herself: her light chatter seemed, then, less light. She was queer but she was serious. She shared her home on the Via Gregoriana with another sculptor, Emma Stebbins, a writer called Matilda Hays, whom everyone called Matthew, and the actress Charlotte Cushman, who recited Shakespeare at every opportunity, and who lounged on sofas even when everyone else was sitting up straight.

  There was Mr Robert Browning, poet, and his wife, Elizabeth, better poet, who were permanently in Florence, but often in Rome; the husband a little dreary, you thought, and who once fell asleep while you were talking to him, but the wife positively other-worldly, an invalid and a genius who talked quite passionately about the power of spirit-rapping and the remarkable achievements of spiritual mediums.

  And then there was the other person, the specific person. You met him on your first full day in Rome. It was Carnival time, and Mr Story had arranged a balcony for you overlooking the Corso, from where you could watch the procession of costumes and masks and dancing. You and the girls were dropping nosegays of camellias and confetti, little pea-sized balls of lime, onto the crowd below, and gentlemen in the procession were in turn tossing bouquets up to you, so that everything about you – hair, feet, skirts – was covered in petals. The scene below was blurry with pink and red flowers, and Meta and Marianne were thrilled, reaching their hands out to clutch at what was thrown. You saw something fluttering through the air towards you, and reached out to catch it: a bunch of violets, and, attached to it by a fine string, a goldfinch. The little bird was struggling to free itself, its yellow wings quivering against your hands and wrists, its eyes bright and black. You snapped the tie off its leg and threw up your arms and watched as it darted away, above the rooftops of the Corso, until you could no longer see its red-masked face, its dark-and-gold-striped back. It was gone, and when you looked down, you saw directly beneath you a man standing still amongst the moving throng, staring up, and you said, ‘Look, what a charming face!’ and Mrs Story said, ‘Oh, that’s Charles Eliot Norton.’

  ‘How shall I get to you?’ he called.

  2013

  Rue d’Aboukir

  ‘How was your journey?’

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Except, there was a sniffer.’

  Max and I are in a taxi from the Gare du Nord to his apartment, and it is phenomenally awkward. We are sitting as far from each other as is possible in the back seat; I am clinging to the handle on the door, my legs crossed away from him. I stare out at the bistros that spill onto the street under red awnings, at tourists walking single file down narrow pavements, at mopeds weaving between the cars and the green crosses of pharmacies illuminating street corners.

  By the end of our year together in Boston, Max and I were used to being almost constantly in each other’s company, but here, in Paris, neither of us is able to think of a single thing to say. I consider making my declaration at once, just to fill the silence.

  I realize that I have never actually been inside a place where Max lives: in Boston we always met in cafes, restaurants, never at our houses. He would collect me from my apartment sometimes, pulling up outside in his little grey car, but I never asked him in. He never even mentioned his place except to say, when asked, that it was in the Back Bay. Even the car, he insisted, was not his. Once I had said, sounding more accusatory than I intended, ‘You have a nice car,’ by which I meant, ‘You have had a whole life before I met you and I don’t know much about it. I do not know how you came to acquire this little grey car,’ but he replied, quietly, ‘It belongs to my brother.’

  The idea of sharing a flat, a bathroom, of seeing the room where he sleeps, feels unprecedented and intimate. The knee-patting incident comes back to me, as does the excruciating embarrassment of my ‘I’ve had feelings for you all year’ email, and I become very aware of how I am sitting. I cross my legs even more tightly, and grip my knees. This whole visit seems, now that it is underway, wildly inappropriate.

  Max’s mind, it seems, has turned to the same thing. ‘I’ve made up the bed for you,’ he says. ‘I’ll take the couch.’

  ‘No, no, really, it’s fine,’ I say. ‘I can’t kick you out of your own bed. I can sleep anywhere. I’m happy on the sofa.’

  ‘Of course you’re not going to sleep on the couch!’ he says.

  I wonder how long we can keep this up. We are sitting in traffic. It is beginning to
get dark. The road ahead of us is glowing with red tail lights.

  ‘I’ll take the sofa,’ I say.

  The entrance to number 35, Rue d’Aboukir, is a small green door cut into an enormous green door. Max pushes it open and holds it while I step through into the stone hallway. The apartment is on the fourth floor, and I climb the stairs, conscious that Max is close behind me, dragging my case up after him. As we near the top, my thighs start to burn. I’m embarrassed by my breathlessness; I try to suppress my panting. When we reach the fourth-floor landing and the narrow black door that leads to Max’s apartment, we are both pink-faced and, while he fiddles with the keys, I go to the window, trying to collect myself. Below is a small courtyard, surrounded by shutters and boxes of geraniums, blots of red against the grey stone. I hear the click of the lock turning and Max says, ‘Ah ha!’ He opens the door and slides my luggage over the threshold.

  Max’s apartment is not, of course, really Max’s. He is sub-renting it from someone he found online: a ballerina called Shu, who is touring with her company in South America. So, now, when I pad around the kitchen, looking at framed prints of inspirational quotes on the walls, and neatly stacked white crockery, it is not Max’s private life I glimpse, but Shu’s. On a shelf is a stack of notes from her boyfriend, mostly inconsequential – ‘Love you Shu baby, have a good day!’ – but archived nonetheless, under a seashell used as a paperweight. Magnets in the shape of ballet shoes hold up postcards on the fridge.