Mrs Gaskell and Me Read online

  It was getting dark. Cool air was blowing into the city from the campagna, bringing with it smells of garlic and oil and wine from side-street kitchens, and Mr Story arranged for rugs to be brought up. You spread them over your knees, and Meta’s and Marianne’s, and gave both of your girls a squeeze. You wanted to show your daughters, and yourself, that you were happy to be there with them, that their company was the most important, that if you had nothing in the world but them, and Rome, and this little seat above the carnival, it would be more than enough. You were inexplicably unsettled, but you tried not to think too deeply, to acknowledge the feeling that bumped and knocked against your contentment: for all that you were lucky, for all that you already had, you still had this capacity to desire other things.

  The flowers and confetti were gone, and there was a murmur from below, as children scurried around and candles were lit, and you picked up on a word repeated breathlessly on the street: mocoletti. You half-turned to ask Mr Story what it meant, but as you did so caught a glimpse of Mr Norton again, deep in conversation with Aubrey de Vere, a gloomy Irish poet who had tried, persistently, to convert you to Catholicism from the moment you arrived. You looked back at the street, and strained your ears to hear their conversation.

  ‘My dear Mr de Vere,’ said Mr Norton, ‘I’m afraid I could not possibly bring myself to believe such a wholly nonsensical doctrine.’

  As the night grew darker, more and more lights gathered below you: flickering wax tapers, thousands of them, and they began to move in a bright stream along the street. Each individual spark, when you focused on it, was tiny, but to look around you and take in the whole of it made you dizzy. Flame after flame joined the throng, and you opened your eyes wider and wider to see it, to fit it all in.

  You remembered those evenings on the ship from Marseille, when the girls sang and you stared down into the phosphorescent water, and how you had felt the dinginess of Manchester life fall away from you like a discarded coat. How far away Manchester was now. But then, in thinking this, you thought of Manchester, and you felt a small knot of worry at the thought of life there going on as usual, of people reading your book and talking about you and saying goodness knows what behind your back.

  You shook your head and returned to yourself. You felt the woollen weave of the rug on your knees, and the rub of your too-tight left shoe against your stockinged foot, the wind moving loose strands of your hair against your cheeks. You were there, on the balcony. You were hovering above a river of wavering, glinting mocoletti, and it was the loveliest thing you had ever seen, and to think about anything else was a waste. You wanted to fix it in your memory.

  Without taking your eyes off the lights, you said to Meta, ‘Isn’t it just the loveliest thing?’

  A second later you realized that Meta’s chair was occupied by someone else, who turned to you with a bright smile and said, ‘It truly is.’

  You swallowed to hide your surprise, and then began to apologize. ‘I thought you were my daughter. She was here just a moment ago.’

  Mr Norton gestured to a group of figures who had retreated from the cold evening air into the inner room. They were standing in a blaze of lamplight and amongst them you recognized Meta’s hair and shoulders, the back of her head.

  ‘Mrs Gaskell,’ said Mr Norton, ‘I have been trying all evening to reach you. So many of your friends have thrown themselves into my path, I thought I might never have the pleasure of introducing myself to one of my favourite writers.’

  He told you his name, and you smiled, as though you hadn’t known it all along. You never felt lost for words, and yet for a second, now, you truly were. Your heart was beating quickly, disturbed. All you could do was say it back to him. ‘Mr Norton.’

  ‘I don’t mean to interrupt you,’ he said. He looked sheepish, and half rose from his chair.

  ‘No,’ you said, ‘no, you’re not.’

  You both looked down at the street, but the silence between you made you fidget, and after a few seconds, you said, ‘Do you know, just before I saw you earlier, I caught a little goldfinch tied up with a bunch of flowers.’

  ‘Did you really?’

  ‘I did,’ you said. ‘I set him free, and he flew away over the roofs towards the Vatican.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mr Norton. ‘I expect he was late for Mass.’

  2013

  Q&A

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I say.

  Max is lying a little away from me in the bed, his back turned, and I reach out to run a finger down the lumps and grooves of his spine. He is drowsy, his shoulders swelling and sinking, but I am wide awake. It is early. The sun has found its way into Shu’s bedroom and my mind is busy and ecstatic. This is my second visit to Paris, and even though two weeks have passed since that first extraordinary, never-expected turn of events in which Max and I became a couple, it still feels unreal. Shu’s shuttered windows and the geraniums outside and the sheet that runs over Max’s body and mine and the mattress between us: it all has an unreal quality, dreamlike, as though I haven’t fully woken up yet.

  ‘Sure,’ says Max, turning over to look at me. The side of his face is creased from the pillow. His eyes are puffy. I am still not used to seeing him like this: guard down. ‘Whatever you want.’

  I have so many questions I’m not sure where to start. ‘Something’ is, in fact, ‘many things’, when it comes to what I do not yet know about Max.

  ‘How old are you?’

  He laughs. ‘You don’t know how old I am?’

  ‘No! How would I?’

  ‘I guess,’ he says, ‘that kind of thing normally just comes up.’

  ‘Do you know how old I am?’ I ask.

  ‘You turn twenty-eight on December 22nd.’

  ‘How—’

  ‘You invited me to your twenty-seventh birthday party last year,’ he says.

  ‘You didn’t come. And you didn’t invite me to yours.’

  ‘I’m thirty-five,’ he says. ‘I don’t have birthday parties any more.’

  Here is what I do know about Max: that he grew up in a suburb of Boston, in a big Irish Catholic family, and spent his summers at the beach on Cape Cod. His childhood was the solid, American kind that seems to me so exotic in films, the very vocabulary of which – Little League, Fourth of July, peanut butter and jelly – is foreign and exciting to my ear. Max always wanted to be a writer, but at some point during his late teenage years began to succumb to the gravitational pull of sensible choices: he decided to become a lawyer. It was a safe, practical option, and after a Master’s degree in literature that he hoped would give him time to write, he went to law school, and from there to the litigation department of a large firm. He counted billable hours while sneaking sentences of the novels he hid in his desk, and, I gather, from a combination of hints and details that ring true in his short stories, growing increasingly miserable. And then, one day, he was done. He quit, went back to Boston, enrolled on the MFA. He was going to write full time. On campus, waiting for the first class to start, he sat on a bench overlooking the river and got out a book, which is when I first saw him, wearing a Red Sox baseball cap and reading Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.

  A week earlier, in London, my friends come over and I take questions as though at a press conference. They have listened to tales of my lovesickness for the past year, have patiently analysed texts and emails from Max, and are full of generous excitement at recent developments, hungry for updates.

  Louise is sitting on the floor; her husband, Frank, is behind her on the sofa. Her head tilts back into his lap, and he’s playing with her hair. I remember seeing them do this before – how thoughtlessly they inhabit each other’s space – and feeling incredulous that I could ever live that way, one half of a pair, and so casually, as though it were nothing extraordinary. But when I try to imagine it now, my head in Max’s lap, his fingers in my hair, it seems suddenly easy.

  ‘OK,’ says Louise. ‘Go. From the beginning.’

&nb
sp; Holly is here, too, hugging her knees in an armchair. She has come straight from court, and her voice still has a hint of lawyerly cross-examination when she asks, ‘So what did he say? Specifically. Did he just turn around and kiss you out of nowhere?’

  ‘I mean, basically, yes.’

  ‘And then he said he loved you.’

  ‘Um, yes.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  She is about to continue her questioning when the bell rings and I get up to buzz in Izra, who is coming late from a parents’ evening. She arrives with her arms full of marking and her eyes wide with a glazed, exhausted stare.

  She sinks into a chair. ‘What did I miss?’

  ‘It’s true love,’ says Holly.

  ‘Oh, is that all?’

  Wine is poured; pizza is retrieved from the oven and divided up. I look around the room at my friends, women I have known since puberty. They are now, without exception, halves of couples, and our social circle has widened to include the men they have chosen to live with. Louise has Frank, Holly has Tom, Izra has Romaine; we have been a clique of seven for years. I have grown used to being the only single one, to entertaining them all with funny stories about bad dates and awkward one-night stands, like a foreign correspondent reporting from a far-off land they once visited but barely remember.

  I have hoped that this would not always be the case, and expected pessimistically that it would be. The fact that I have found Max, that he is in love with me and says so all the time, makes me feel dizzy, jubilant, joyful, but also something quieter: I am relieved. I am not the solitary one any more.

  ‘So when can we meet him?’ asks Louise.

  ‘Is he going to move to London?’ asks Izra.

  ‘Has he explained what made him change his mind about you?’ asks Holly.

  My Ph.D. supervisor is a woman called Joyce. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, and in particular, ‘writing and friendship’, which she talks about with a sort of brusque warmth. She has requested that I come and see her once every fortnight, so she can ‘keep an eye on how things are going’.

  ‘If you could send me your notes the day before each meeting, I can have a look and we can discuss them,’ she said. I found this request comforting when she first made it, a reassurance that I would not be left to my own devices, to spiral out of control unsupervised. Now, at our third meeting, I find myself wishing that spiralling out of control unsupervised was, after all, an option.

  We are sitting in her office on the seventh floor of the Virginia Woolf building at King’s, and she is unimpressed. She shuffles printouts of my notes on the table between us, and flicks through the pages.

  ‘There’s not much here, Nell,’ she says, ‘for two weeks’ work.’

  ‘I’ve been reading,’ I say, defensively. I look around the room, at the shelves stacked with books and with other students’ finished theses: weighty tomes in blue binding with gold lettering down the spines.

  ‘What have you been reading?’

  What have I been reading? Text messages and emails from Max, mostly. ‘Letters,’ I say.

  ‘I’d have liked to see more of a plan by this point in the term,’ she says. ‘I’d like to see a real sense of direction for your research.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been … distracted, I guess,’ I say.

  She nods. ‘What is it – a new boyfriend?’ Her expression is both indulgent and disappointed as she folds her hands in her lap.

  I want to cover my face. I’m blushing. In this room, in this building, I am supposed to be an intellectual, single-mindedly pursuing a deeper understanding of my subject. Instead, I am being outed as a light-weight: predictable, girlish, immature. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘The thing is, Nell, you won’t get through this if you don’t focus.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know.’

  ‘A Ph.D. has to be an obsession. You have to have a monomania for it. Otherwise, it just won’t happen. You won’t get through three or four years of sitting by yourself in a library if it isn’t absolutely the thing you want to be doing above all else. It has to be a labour of love.’

  On my second visit to Paris, Max and I go to the Louvre, and despite everything, despite him, despite the art all around us and the city beyond, I am sulking. Joyce’s warning has stayed with me, churning in the back of my mind: a Ph.D. has to be a labour of love; otherwise, it just won’t happen. It has followed me all the way to St Pancras, onto the Eurostar, to Shu’s apartment and, now, here, to the largest museum in the world.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this Ph.D.,’ I tell Max. ‘Maybe it was a stupid idea.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not cut out to be an academic,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I care enough about the sorts of things academics care about.’ We are walking at speed through the high-ceilinged galleries, following signs, like everyone else, to the Mona Lisa. ‘I like reading the writing of writers I love, and I like reading about writers I love. But I’m not sure I have anything additional to say about them. I think I’m more of an appreciative fan than a critic.’

  ‘Then why do it?’

  ‘I thought it would be good for my writing. And I thought it would help me get a job teaching at a university so I can write in the holidays and still get a mortgage. And I liked the idea of being an expert in something.’

  ‘Those are all solid reasons.’

  ‘But I’m over halfway through my first term,’ I say, ‘and I’m not even close to coming up with a subject, let alone being an expert.’ The thought of spending the next three years in the library trying to make sense of scraps of writing by distant, long-dead people, trying to shape them into something coherent, is weighing heavily on me. ‘I feel as though I know even less than when I started. I don’t even know which country I’m writing about. Joyce says I need to have monomania for it, but I don’t even feel like I have normal mania for it.’

  Max stops in front of an Arcimboldo painting of a man’s face assembled entirely from vegetables. ‘Forget monomania,’ he says. ‘Just tell me what you like about it. There must be something good about it – something that moves you.’ Behind his head, the portrait’s courgette nose protrudes.

  I stop. I think. And then I tell Max about Mrs Gaskell.

  When did I first start to love her? Was it when I was a teenager and read Mary Barton for the first time? Was it when, at the end of the novel, the characters leave Manchester, and cross the Atlantic to start a new life in a ‘long low wooden house, with room enough and to spare’, and the words washed around in my mind for weeks afterwards? It could have been then, or when I moved on to North and South or Ruth or Cranford, turning pages restlessly, wanting to get to the end without wanting them to be over.

  Or was it when, as a Master’s student, I found her books on the reading list for a module called, bleakly, ‘Death in the Nineteenth Century’. I began an essay about her weird little novella, Lois the Witch, in which a young English girl travels to Salem, gets accused of witchcraft and is eventually hanged. The story of Lois seemed an odd choice of subject matter for an author I’d previously associated with domestic sagas and philanthropically motivated condition-of-England novels, but I loved it, and loved her for writing it.

  As I worked on my essay, I wanted to get a sense of who Mrs Gaskell was, so I went to the Birkbeck Library in Russell Square, sat at a desk in front of the tall glass windows that overlooked the courtyard, and began reading her letters. And though I had seen the breadth of her imagination in her fiction, it was there, on the pages of her Collected Correspondence, that I really met Mrs Gaskell. Do you know we are going to have a little kitten sent us from Paris, with long hair, and a very pretty face, and is called Cranford, can you guess why? Every line of the letters fizzed with energy. Within a single paragraph, she covered what she planned to have for dinner and an international political incident, with some literary scandal thrown in for good me
asure. I am afraid this letter is going to be what Dr Holland once called a letter of mine ‘a heterogeneous mass of nonsense.’ But that was before I wrote Mary B – he would not say so now. Her slapdash punctuation and non-sequiturs and multiple exclamation marks belonged to a person too alive to be contained within the strictures of regular, nineteenth-century grammar. Nature intended me for a gypsy-bachelor; that I am sure of. Not an old maid for they are particular & fidgety, and tidy, and punctual, – but a gypsy-bachelor. It was probably then, I tell Max, that my love for her crystallized, became a fixture in my life.

  I had never encountered a writer who could fill a page so entirely with herself, and haven’t since. Mrs Gaskell is witty, and cutting, and sharp, and hilarious, and gossipy, and excitable, and dramatic, and above all, brimming with love for the people around her. Do write us a long letter, we seem very far away from you; & I shan’t begin to enjoy myself till I hear from you. It oozes from those letters, that love; it reached me as soon as I began reading them, in the twenty-first century, in the Birkbeck College Library at Russell Square. I was caught up in her life almost instantly, in the hubbub of domesticity at her home on Plymouth Grove, in the ferocity with which she worked and fired off letters to her publisher and to other writers, and in the way she never seemed quite content with any of it: she played the role of wife and mother so very well, and so lovingly, but she was a ‘gypsy bachelor’ nonetheless.

  She was always demanding long letters from her loved ones, and complaining if the replies she received were too short. I felt – still feel – a pang, something like lovesickness, when I think that Mrs Gaskell and I can’t write to each other. We would write such good letters, I think. We would have so much to say.

  When I imagine my ideal Ph.D. – the one that could actually be a labour of love, a monomania, a joy to write – it is one long letter to Mrs Gaskell.

  By the time I finish explaining all of this to Max, we have reached the Mona Lisa. There is a crowd of tourists around the painting and we can’t get close. I stand on tiptoes, trying to get a look, but all I see is the pale circle of a face repeated over and over on the screens of raised phones, taking pictures.