Mrs Gaskell and Me Read online

  ‘The bedroom’s through here,’ Max says, lifting my case and disappearing with it through a doorway. I follow and watch as he sets it down beside the bed. Stacked against the wall are piles of books that I know are his and not Shu’s because the collection comprises, almost entirely, books I love, and books I feel bad for not having read yet. Along the far wall there is an open clothes rail, from which Max’s shirts hang in a row, and I have been so hyper-aware of Max for so long that I recognize each one and feel warm towards them, as though they are old friends. They are a line of past and future Maxes, waiting to come to life.

  He moves back to the living room, and again I go after him, bringing my case with me. I put it next to the sofa. Max gets wine from the fridge. He points a remote at a speaker and music starts playing. He digs a corkscrew out of a drawer and begins to twist it into the cork.

  I feel a sudden surge of glee to be there, with him, listening to music, about to drink wine.

  ‘I’m so happy I came,’ I say. ‘I’m so happy to see you.’

  There’s a pause and then Max says, ‘Me too,’ without looking up from the wine bottle. It sounds so unconvincing and restrained that I blush and feel stupid, immature, too giddy. I retreat into the bathroom.

  There is a rusting shower head poised over a tiny tub, and a sink squeezed in between the bath and the toilet. Max’s shaving things are balanced next to the taps, and there are still little flecks of black stubble dotting the white enamel. The tap splutters when I turn it on, and the hairs swirl towards the plughole. There is no mirror above the sink into which I can glare and give myself a pep talk, so instead I scowl at the pattern of pale blue swirls on white tiles, and take several deep breaths, and rehearse for the hundredth time my declaration. I can’t be your friend any more. I hear his footsteps in the other room, crossing the floor. I have to fall out of love with you. The clink of a glass being set down on the table top. More footsteps on the creaking boards. And if I’m going to do that, I can’t be your friend.

  When I come out, Max is standing at the window, looking down at the street. He is still, only moving to take occasional sips of wine, and I pause in the doorway to watch him. I have spent a lot of time, this past year, watching Max. One of our classmates at BU once confronted me about my feelings for him, and when I asked her how she knew, she said, ‘Because you gaze at him, longingly, in class.’ I was mortified. Now, while Max’s back is turned, I indulge in a long gulp of a stare.

  Thick black hair that flicks in several directions at once, with strands of light grey through it that remind me, whenever I notice, that I have no idea how old he is. The back of his neck, brown after a Massachusetts summer spent surfing, dips behind a checked blue collar. He is solid underneath his shirt, with wide swimmer’s shoulders, and I have always loved the contrast between this, his breadth and bulk, and the way he inhabits space so gently. He is light-footed; his movements are small, apologetic; he is always careful about what he does with his hands, his feet, his eyes. He lifts his glass to his mouth and his sleeve falls back from his wrist, and I am just admiring the reassuring thickness of his forearm, the curve of muscle over bone, when he turns and sees me watching him.

  He smiles. ‘Maybe we should go out,’ he says.

  ‘We should,’ I say. We must. I need to get out of this apartment, away from the music and the glass of wine meant for me that is sitting untouched on the table and the window that frames the man I love as though he were made just to stand in it. I need to leave because I have to make my declaration, and I am so breathlessly lustful in this moment that I can no longer remember the gist of it, let alone the words.

  Outside, I remember that we are in Paris. Two hours on the train and just like that: a new country. It is so different from London, and yet, compared to America, so reassuringly European, that I am briefly disoriented as we walk down Rue d’Aboukir. The road is straight and quiet, punctuated with gaping doorways and occasional shopfronts. Right at the end, just before the street opens out onto the Place des Victoires, is a taxidermist’s shop, the proprietor of which seems to specialize in creating chimera. The window presents a row of white mice with butterfly wings, a hawk with the head of an otter, a monkey with a bushy, white-tipped fox’s tail. The face of a polar bear bursts through an arrangement of parrots. Further back in the display, a raven holds a key in its mouth.

  After dinner, we walk through the gardens of the Palais Royal, past the Ritz (closed for renovations; a banner on the scaffolding reads, ‘A Legend in Progress’), and then into the Tuileries, which are doused in orange light that rests on the edges of fallen leaves and rippled puddles. We make our way down walkways lined with foliage and suddenly, Max grabs my arm.

  I jump. ‘What is it?’

  Max says nothing for a second, and then, ‘I thought there was someone in the bushes.’

  I peer into the empty flower bed beside the path. ‘I don’t think there is.’

  But he doesn’t let go of me. We carry on, arm in arm, and I am pathetically grateful for the gesture, knowing, as I do, that it is for my sake, that he knows how happy I feel walking like this, even when my shoulder begins to cramp because I am bending weirdly to fit under his arm.

  We cross the river on the Pont des Arts, its walls bristling with locks attached by couples convinced, in a way I can’t imagine, that their love is eternal enough to warrant commemoration on a French monument. At the end of the bridge, ridiculously, there is a newlywed couple doing a photoshoot. The bride is wearing an enormous white ball gown that draws in light from the streetlamps. The groom stands beside her, hand on her waist, and beams towards the crouching photographer. I start to laugh at the awkwardness of everything – of me, and Max, and this obnoxiously romantic city doing everything it can to highlight our inadequacies – but when I peer up at Max he looks stricken, the way he did that day in the parking lot in the rain, just before he got in the car. He is not laughing.

  ‘I need to tell you something,’ I say.

  ‘OK,’ says Max, and his face is stricken, stricken, stricken.

  I take a breath. ‘I …’ Do it. Say it. ‘I …’ No words. So: ‘I’m really happy to be here.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, looking concerned still. ‘Me too.’

  The stricken face happens again and again. He makes it at the makeshift bar on the banks of the Seine where we stop for a drink. He makes it outside the Shakespeare and Company bookshop: it is late and the shop has closed, but there is enough light from the street to see the over-stacked shelves and the hand-painted sign: Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise. When I turn to point this out to Max, there it is again: this expression of near-panic, his forehead creased, his lips unset, as though unsure what word to form. It happens on some stone steps near Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and again outside Notre-Dame, and again when we return to Rue d’Aboukir and pause for another look at the taxidermist’s macabre display.

  He knows, I think. He knows about my declaration. Of course he does. He senses it is coming, and is conflicted: relieved that I am drawing a line under my infatuation, sad to lose a friend.

  Little green door inside the big green door. We climb the stairs and Max fumbles with the lock again and I brace myself for another round of squabbling about who takes the sofa, and when we get inside he makes his stricken face and says, ‘I’m going to try something, OK?’ and kisses me, and then we both take the bed.

  2013

  ‘I never get over to you’: Unreachable Americas and the Idea of Home in the Letters and Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell

  ‘“Sometimes I dream I am in America, but it always looks like home, which I know it is not,” Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to her American friend Charles Eliot Norton in 1860. To Edward Hale, another American acquaintance, she described America as “like the moon; I am sure it is somewhere, but quite untouchable in this mortal state.” Gaskell’s letters make repeated attempts to describe her relationship to America: a place she read about, whose citizens she knew as
friends, but which she never visited herself. America emerges in these accounts as a distant, inconceivable place, whose existence is as undeniable as the moon’s, but which is so far away as to exist, nonetheless, in the realm of the imaginary. “Sometimes I dream I go over to Boston,” she wrote, again to Norton, in the year of her death, “but, I always pass into such a cold thick damp fog on leaving the river at Liverpool that I never get over to you.” She draws a parallel between the imaginative and the physical journey: her inability to reach Boston in her dream is figured as an aborted sea voyage, a ship lost in fog.’

  I have a distinct sense, as I speak, that I am losing the room. There is a muffled, restless noise coming from the group of people who are sitting around a horseshoe of desks, watching me. Legs are crossed and uncrossed, pens fiddled with, pages turned. There are a few paper plates of crisps being passed around, and whenever I pause, someone takes the opportunity to grab a handful.

  I press on. ‘Gaskell describes herself as “homesick” for America and the American spaces inhabited by her friends: “as if I had seen them once, and yearned to see them again.” So, the question my research will ask is: What does it mean to be homesick for an imaginary place? Where does Gaskell locate herself, as an artist, if she insists on a homeland she never reached?’

  Behind me on a screen is a PowerPoint slide depicting the original title page of a Gaskell novella called The Moorland Cottage: it includes an illustration of a group of people staring bleakly into a fireplace, as though expecting it to produce some sort of spectacle. Yesterday, when I put this presentation together, it all seemed quite moving: Gaskell’s yearning for the New World, her inability to reach it even in her dreams, the sad story of The Moorland Cottage in which a troubled English boy sets sail to start a new life, to make a new home, in America, but instead drowns when his ship sinks near Wales. I thought that people would be instantly touched, as I am all the time, by the words and stories of Mrs Gaskell.

  Instead, the faces looking back at me from the rest of the room appear unmoved. They belong to the new cohort of doctoral students in the English department of King’s College London. For the first year of our Ph.D. careers, we are required to attend a weekly meeting, termed, intimidatingly, the ‘doctoral seminar’, in which each student will present their proposed research project to the group.

  So far in the seminar series we have seen presentations on:

  — [Un]realism and [Hyper]realism in the Work of J. G. Ballard

  — Katherine Mansfield, the Form of the Short Story and the Tyrannies of Female Fashion

  — The Role of the Doorstep in the Fiction of Charles Dickens

  My presentation is, at best, a guess: I have no clear idea what my thesis is going to be about. The proposal I wrote when I applied to King’s focused vaguely on the idea of ‘imaginary Americas’ in the work of British writers who had never actually been to America. I was interested, I wrote, in the way these writers projected their desires and fears onto the blank canvas of the out-of-reach New World. After my year studying in Boston, the idea of longing for America seemed compelling. Writing about people writing about America would be an excuse to explore my own yearning for Max, and for the place in which I met and fell in love with him. I, too, pine for America.

  Last week, however, I visited Max in Paris and before I could make my friendship-ending declaration to him, he made a different kind of declaration to me, which was, in summary: I love you. Since getting back to London I have been giddy and confused, replaying over and over the moment of discovery and its aftermath – the kiss, the bed, the I love you, the jubilantly sleepless nights and the following days we spent stumbling around the city clinging onto each other in a lustful mania – and now I am even less certain than I was before that my Ph.D. should be about yearning. Thirsting is not as interesting as it used to be. Longing is no longer relevant. I am in London and Max is in Paris and I have nothing left for which to yearn.

  To complicate matters further, when I actually got around to putting together my presentation, I realized that the only example I knew of a British writer imagining America without going there is Mrs Gaskell, so it is Mrs Gaskell and only Mrs Gaskell that I discuss. Three minutes into my presentation, it is apparent to everyone here that a few letters, two novellas and some scattered references towards the end of a couple of novels is not enough material for a thesis.

  After the presentation, the Q&A. I have been dreading it: my ignorance and guesswork could be so easily exposed. I don’t, yet, know very much at all about unreachable Americas and the idea of home in the letters and fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, and it would take only the very gentlest of questioning to make this apparent. That said, at the previous three seminars, the Q&A has rarely been focused enough to expose anyone or anything. Rather, it has been an excuse for other people to ask why the presenter has not considered the thing that they themselves have decided to research, which is obviously the most important angle to be taken on any writer, any subject, anything, always. Based on this evidence, I can anticipate interrogation along the following lines:

  — From the lanky boy who reeks of cigarettes and writes on J. G. Ballard: Have you considered the role of un-and hyper-realism in Gaskell’s portrayals of America?

  — From the doorsteps-in-Dickens girl, who has a tattoo of Dickens’ signature scrawled along the inside of her forearm: What role do you feel the notion of the liminal, the threshold, plays in Gaskell’s writing? Could you see the form of the letter, which crosses between real and imaginary spaces, as a kind of doorstep? Did Elizabeth Gaskell ever write about doors?

  — We may also cover, according to the various research projects represented in the room, Gaskell and the tyrannies of female fashion; Gaskell and industrial coal mining; Gaskell and the narration of political divisions and civil unrest that might be seen to anticipate the Israel–Palestine conflict. And so on.

  The questions come, more or less ridiculous. My stock response each time is to write busily in my notebook and say, ‘That’s interesting. Yes, I’ll look into that. Thank you.’ None of them results in the anticipated humiliation, and it feels as though I am dodging knives thrown at my head, like some kind of academic ninja. I am even able to answer, moderately competently, a query about the reasons Gaskell never did go to America: she was married, she had four daughters and a frantically busy career. It seems, after all, I had nothing to fear. Perhaps I really do know what I am talking about.

  Then, the professor, who has been tilting back in his chair silently until now, rocks forward and lands at the table with a thud. He is a specialist in nineteenth-century literature, and has written papers on Gaskell, and I am therefore hoping that he will look kindly on me. We are allies, united by mutual respect for our subject.

  ‘I think, Nell, there may be a slight misreading underpinning your analysis,’ he says.

  He looks formidably serious, and I can feel blood rushing to my cheeks: a blush that proceeds to descend, like paint dripping, down my neck and under the collar of my shirt.

  ‘Oh?’ I say. I try my best to appear unruffled, composed. My pen is raised, ready to note something down as I offer my stock response.

  ‘The quote you gave, in which Gaskell dreams of America and finds that it looks like home.’

  ‘Yes?’ I have the impression the professor is enjoying dragging this out.

  ‘I think, if you look carefully, you’ll realize that it does not in fact say “home” in that letter. It says “Rome”. It says, “Sometimes I dream I am in America, but it always looks like Rome.” ’

  I scribble in my notebook furiously. ‘Oh, that’s really interesting,’ I say. ‘Thank you. I’ll look into that.’

  1857

  Goldfinch

  It was as crowded on the balcony as it looked in the street below. There were so many of you squeezed in together, elbow to elbow, that when Mr Norton finally arrived, you all had to shuffle around awkwardly. You had watched him disappear beneath you, after Mrs Story had calle
d down instructions for how to get up, and there had been a disconcertingly long wait for him to reappear. You had craned your neck over the iron railings to see whether he was stuck at the door, but had only managed to feel the rush of air as a bouquet flew past your face, and see the roofs of carriages strewn with flowers passing below. You sat back down and waited. Then you heard, behind you, the door click open and commotion as the crowded group reordered itself to accommodate another body.

  You were shunted forwards until you were leaning right against the rail with Meta almost on your lap. Her hair brushed your face and you waved it away so that you could see, clearly, everything around you: the carnival, the street. You did not turn around. You felt suddenly self-conscious. Mr Norton must have heard you calling his face ‘charming’. You thought people looked charming all the time, but you didn’t usually proclaim it, loudly, from balconies. What was it about this person, this face, that had forced the words to erupt from you like that? You knew that later, soon even, you would find this funny, but for now you inwardly grimaced at yourself, your impulsiveness. You felt oddly aware of the back of your head, as though someone was staring at it.

  ‘Ma, are you all right?’ Marianne, the other side of Meta, was watching you.

  You noticed that the carnival was beginning to die down. There was less to look at below.

  Marianne, again: ‘You’ve gone quiet, Ma.’

  The crowd in the Corso was thinning. You wished for more noise. You heard, over the chatter of the other conversations around you on the balcony, Mrs Story saying, ‘Oh, we all just adore her here,’ and you wondered if she was talking to Mr Norton about you, and then frowned at your own presumption. ‘She arrived only last night,’ Mrs Story went on, and then you knew she really was talking about you.

  ‘I am utterly devoted to North and South,’ you heard a voice say in return: American, male, not belonging to any of the people you knew, and therefore belonging to Mr Norton.

  You were never really shy, Mrs Gaskell, except for in this moment.