Mrs Gaskell and Me Read online

  I cannot have any peace of mind if I treat other people unfairly.

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  People tell me how they really feel.

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  I sometimes feel a spiritual connection to others that I can’t explain.

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  I like it when people can do whatever they want without strict rules.

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  When I fail at something, I become more determined to do a good job.

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  I worry more than others that something will go wrong in the future.

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  Other people control me too much.

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  I am usually able to get other people to believe me, even when I know that what I am saying is exaggerated or untrue.

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  Circumstances often force me to do things against my will.

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  I know what I want to do in my life.

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  By the time I come back to the silhouette questions again, several hours have passed and I am dizzy. Danielle has given me the same printouts, the same questions. I have to answer them afresh, except that this time my head is fuzzy and the little black figures are dancing on the paper. I rub residual glue from the sensors away from the skin under my eye. I frown. I concentrate.

  Please mark the silhouette that best represents your body shape. Please mark how you wish to look. Which is the most attractive silhouette? Which is the most attractive silhouette to the opposite sex?

  There is no need to overthink this, I tell myself. Just pick one of the pictures. It doesn’t matter. I am the subject, not the critic, and all I have to do is be. It is someone else’s Ph.D.; it is someone else’s work to study me. I am her Mrs Gaskell.

  And still, as the little bodies swim across the page, my mind wanders to my own work, to the desk in the Rare Books Reading Room where, on any other weekday, I would be sitting with a stack of dusty books. How much easier it would be, I think, if the subjects of my thesis were available to come down to my lab and answer a few questions.

  Please mark the silhouette that best represents your body shape, Mrs Gaskell. Please mark how you wish to look. Which is the most attractive silhouette to the opposite sex, Mrs Gaskell? What do you think Mr Norton wishes to see, when, in his mind, he unwraps you from your shawls and unbuttons your dress and unhooks your stays and lifts up your chemise? Which of these silhouettes would he see, then, in his mind’s eye?

  I am known as an ‘eager beaver’ because of my enthusiasm for work.

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  If I am embarrassed or humiliated, I get over it very quickly.

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  I find sad songs and movies boring.

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  I usually enjoy being mean to anyone who has been mean to me.

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  Please circle the number one; this is a validity item.

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  I can easily do things others would consider dangerous.

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  I am in contact with a divine and wonderful spiritual power.

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  I have so many faults that I don’t like myself very much.

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  I have had moments of great, overwhelming joy.

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  1857

  Via Sant’Isidoro

  First thing in the morning, you went to your window and looked down at the Via Sant’Isidoro, the narrow road with its steep stone steps and sharp edges. In the early light, shadows cut the street in two, half bright, half murky and asleep. The bells of the Franciscan church on the corner rang every day at seven, and you gazed out at the white chapel and the monks emerging from the monastery behind, heads bowed. They looked antlike from your room on the fourth floor, and you wanted to reach out and prod them, flick their lowered chins and say, ‘Look up! Look where you are! Look where we are!’ It was your second month in Rome, and still these mornings thrilled and surprised you: how bright the sun, how crisp and clean the air from your window perch.

  Below, the servants were beginning to move around. A maid came into view, climbing the steps towards the house in twos, her arms full of flowers; behind her, whistling, a man walking an enormous grey dog, which loped after him and sniffed the doorstep of the house. A horse clattered past along the Via degli Artisti, pulling a cart loaded with jangling wine bottles and driven by a peasant in dusty country clothes. Its hooves sounded loud and crisp against the cobbles. There were always noises in Rome, musical and distinct, but somehow they never merged, as they did in Manchester, into the kind of cacophonous background din that made your head ache.

  The sun was climbing and you began to feel impatient. You were happy simply to sit and watch; you could stare for hours at the lichen creeping up the walls and the stone carvings built into it that announced, so triumphantly, SPQR. But you were also restless, and you drummed your fingers on the window frame, tapping out soundlessly the arpeggios your daughters practised on the piano. You were waiting. You had come to expect from your Roman mornings not only this moment of joyful surveillance, but a meeting.

  You were so happy that you were anxious, all the time, that your happiness would come to an end.

  And then there he was, as he had been every morning since you met, as you should never have doubted he would be. Mr Norton, trotting neatly up the steps, a bunch of violets in one hand, his hat in the other. You watched as he arranged it on his head and glanced at his reflection in the window, patting down the lapels of his coat.

  ‘Mr Norton!’ you called down, and he looked up slowly, as though he had known you were watching all along.

  He joined you every day for breakfast, which was a raucous, crowded affair on the Casa Cabrale loggia, overlooking the courtyard: Mr and Mrs Story, their daughter Edith and bumptious little son Waldo, your girls Meta and Marianne, Aubrey de Vere and his Catholic friend, Reverend General Dr Manning. There was Mr Fields, a British artist, and Mr Hamilton Wilde, an American painter. Mrs Beecher Stowe had joined for three days in a row, and had been severe to everyone and talked politics over her eggs. Several times, Miss Hosmer had bustled in at the last minute, telling other guests to ‘budge up’ unapologetically, and helping herself to coffee. Other people drifted in and out, all notable for some great talent or other – sculptors, poets, philosophers, critics – and all with something interesting and humorous to say. You were right there in the thick of it, with a witty reply to everything, but you saved your best for Mr Norton.

  A fortnight into your acquaintance, he had arrived early and found you the only one awake, and you had sat together at the empty breakfast table while the servants set places and brought in dishes around you. Since then it had become an unofficial daily engagement for the two of you to spend this time together, a snatched half-hour before your friends and family arrived, hungry and busy and anxious to join in. After breakfast the days took hold of you, and you were dragged off to see the city’s endless exhibition of art and ruins and churches, and Mr Norton was there with you, to point out the paintings he thought you might like, to offer some anecdote of Roman history that brought to life a heap of stones, to catch your eye over the heads of the others and grin at some unvoiced joke that only the two of you understood.

  Mr Norton was still on the street, squinting up at you in your window, when the Story’s man opened the door to let him in. You watched him step inside before leaving your vantage point. As you crossed the room, you caught sight of your reflection in the mirror, and paused. You turned your face from one side to the other, and wondered whether you looked as bright as you felt, as fresh as you felt. You were forty-six, about to have breakfast with a man seventeen years your junior, who made you feel twenty, twenty-five, thirty years younger than you were. You laughed to yourself, and blinked at your reflection, and then hurried on.

  ‘Mrs Gaskell.’ He stood up when you came into the room.

  ‘You’re late this
morning, Mr Norton,’ you said, pulling out your own chair and dropping into it. ‘I was looking out for you and thinking my day would be quite put out if you didn’t come for our morning coffee.’ You had developed a habit of talking quickly and too much to him. You were scared of silence in his company, and filled it constantly. ‘And then of course, there you were, and I shouldn’t have worried after all.’

  He nudged the bouquet of violets that were resting near his coffee cup towards you. ‘I rely on our morning meetings for a moment’s sanity, before the Roman hullaballoo starts up.’

  ‘I have so much I wanted to say to you,’ you said. You picked up the violets and played with them, rubbing the velvety petals between your fingers. ‘I was awake three times last night thinking of things I absolutely had to say to Mr Norton the minute he arrived. I have an idea for a new story, a sort of ghost story, about a strange encounter in Rome, and I would like to test it out on you. But first, before I forget, I need to talk to you about that painting we saw yesterday in the Palazzo Barberini—’

  ‘The Guido?’

  ‘Yes, the portrait of Beatrice Cenci. My mind keeps coming back to it, and I wanted to tell you – I’ve decided – it is the most miserable painting I think I’ve ever seen.’

  A laugh erupted from Mr Norton, loud and delighted. ‘Mrs Gaskell, it is considered a masterpiece.’

  ‘A miserable masterpiece,’ you said, ‘but really I don’t believe it is as good as everyone says, and—’

  You heard a noise behind you and turned, thinking it would be a servant bringing in the breakfast things. But instead, you saw Meta, bleary-eyed and crumpled from sleep.

  ‘Ma,’ she said, midway through a yawn. ‘What are you doing up? Hello, Mr Norton.’ She flopped down in a chair and turned to him. ‘Mama is always the last to come to breakfast at home.’

  ‘In Rome I am quite the early bird,’ you said, and then, glancing at the clock over the mantelpiece, ‘and so are you, today, Meta. We weren’t expecting anyone else for twenty minutes at least.’

  Meta shrugged. ‘Marianne kept me up half the night with her fidgeting and sleep-talking, and then the sun woke me up by shining right in my eyes and I thought there’s nothing for it except to get up and make the best of the day. Coffee,’ she said. ‘I need coffee.’

  Mr Norton was smiling at Meta, but you wondered whether he, too, was feeling a pang for your lost half-hour. Then, from behind you, someone said, ‘Oh, we’re starting early today I see,’ and Mr Story appeared, beaming, and after him toddled Waldo, who ran straight to you and began to babble earnestly and incomprehensibly in a childish jargon based loosely on English, with some Italian thrown in, and then Edith emerged talking about a dream she’d had, and Mr de Vere moped in, offering blessings, and the room, which had been yours and yours alone only moments ago, was suddenly full of bustle and bodies and competing voices.

  Later, as the coffee was being poured, and Mr Story was outlining the proposed sightseeing plan for the day, and Waldo was howling because he wanted more pane, Mr Norton leant across to you and said, very quietly, ‘You owe me a ghost story, Mrs Gaskell. I won’t forget.’

  2013

  Shakespeare and Company

  The library room at Shakespeare and Company is smaller than Shu’s bedroom, full of books, and, as the workshop begins, full of people too. We sit, thighs touching, on benches that run around the shelf-lined walls; someone is at my feet on the floor, leaning her back against my shins. The workshop leader, a man somewhere between my age and Max’s, sits self-consciously in the window seat, a foot hooked on the ledge so that his knee is high enough for him to drape an arm across it. He looks as though he is posing for a portrait, as though, in his head, he is picturesque, iconic, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and all his writer-predecessors in the city who made this bookshop famous. Behind him is the road, and beyond it, the river. Looming over the water is Notre-Dame, floodlit.

  I gaze awkwardly around the room. I have spent so much time, recently, envious of Mrs Gaskell and her troupe of expatriate artists in Rome; so here I am, trying to embrace the idea that in this room at Shakespeare and Co. we are maintaining an important and cherished tradition of writers working side by side in Paris. I try to convince myself that the evening ahead is going to be as illuminating and provocative and thrilling as a salon at Gertrude Stein’s. To my left is an American lady, talking to a lanky college-aged boy about a woman named Angela who may or may not be willing to emcee a poetry slam. On my other side, a young man is staring silently at a sheaf of papers in his hands. I read them over his shoulder: on the first is a poem titled ‘The Maiden or the Mistress? A Riddle’. Max is sitting across the room, looking earnest and excited, occasionally catching my eye. I make a face at him that expresses, I hope, a combination of nerves, amusement and thrill.

  ‘Welcome to the Writers’ Workshop at Shakespeare and Company,’ says the man in the window seat. ‘For those who don’t know already, I’m David. I’m a novelist. Hi.’

  ‘Hi, David,’ everyone mutters.

  ‘I see some new faces tonight, so let’s just go around the group and say who we are – just a name and where you’re from, and whether you’ve brought anything for us to read.’

  There is an agitated rustling in the room as, one by one, people introduce themselves. When Max says, ‘Max,’ and raises a hand in an awkward wave, I feel a sudden urge to laugh, and look down at the head of the person sitting between my feet. There are college students on their semesters abroad, British retirees, a man who spends his summers working on Alaskan oil rigs and his winters here, writing poetry. The American lady beside me is Christina from Texas, and she has brought some poems; the boy she was speaking to is Brad from California, who has a short story to share. The man with the ‘Maiden or the Mistress’ poem says his name is Jason and that he is from Birmingham, and then he waves his papers and mutters that he’s brought ‘a verse of sorts’.

  ‘Nell,’ I say. ‘From London. I brought,’ I pause, and wonder if this is really such a good idea, ‘some nonfiction.’ I have printed out fifteen copies of a passage I’ve written about William Wetmore Story and the salons he held at his house in Rome every Friday.

  When we have been around everyone, there is a silence while David scrutinizes his register.

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Let’s start. Christina – shall we hear from you?’

  Nobody has brought enough copies, so we huddle around scraps of paper, three or four to a sheet. First, someone who is not the author reads the work aloud. Then a second person, also not the author, reads it aloud. Then, the author reads it aloud. After that, there is a free-for-all of criticism that begins politely and then gradually, timidly, edges towards negativity.

  In this way, we make it through Christina’s poems (‘Has the author really earned the expletives in the final stanza?’), Brad’s short story about a suicidal Iraq veteran (‘Too much exposition’; protagonist ‘unrelatable’) and a series of haiku by an English girl called Millie, which, the group agreed, were pithy but, ultimately, hackneyed. I have said nothing, so far, and have been keeping my eyes fixed on the words on the page to avoid being invited to contribute. Max has, occasionally, chipped in with encouragement and reading suggestions. ‘Your story reminds me a bit of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by Salinger,’ he tells Brad. ‘Have you read it?’ Brad says he has not read ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’.

  ‘All right,’ says David, again, and I brace myself to hear my own name called. But: ‘Jason. Let’s have a look at that “verse of sorts”.’

  Beside me, Jason twists on the bench and passes out sheets of paper as though being forced to do so against his will. There are even fewer copies of Jason’s work than of the previous offerings, and they run out about halfway around the room. With nothing to read, I make do, instead, with watching other people as they scan the pages. Max has shifted so that he can see someone else’s copy: his eyes widen, and then flick towards me. I can’t quite read his expression, beyo
nd suggesting a degree of alarm.

  I mouth: ‘What?’ across the room to him, but he just widens his eyes again.

  Christina volunteers to be the first reader, and there is a brief commotion while a copy of the poem is given up from the other side of the room and passed to her. Then, she begins.

  ‘The Maiden or the Mistress,’ she reads, in a cheerful, slightly nasal voice. ‘A Riddle.’ She clears her throat. ‘With her angelic eyes, she blesses me with grace. I want to touch her body and her skin and her fair face.’

  I relax. This is, clearly, not the literary highlight of the evening. Nor is it, though, the worst thing that has been read aloud so far: some of Millie’s haiku were in a similar vein. Christina reads on. We hear about the woman’s skin (‘snow-white’) and her hair (‘which waves like an ocean’). Then, the poem broadens its preoccupation to a discussion of women in general: ‘Womankind is fickle; in her temper she is cruel. In not-so-distant centuries she faced the ducking stool.’

  I laugh, and then look around and realize that nobody knows if this is supposed to be funny. Two of the American college girls appear horrified. I don’t dare look at Max. Christina herself fidgets awkwardly on the bench as she goes on to read several couplets examining the misleading nature of feminine beauty and the impossibility of ensuring a woman’s fidelity. ‘Behind her sweet demeanour and her diamond eyes, she hides her lasciviousness and her lies.’ Beside me, Jason is tense. He is jiggling his foot on the floor, his thigh vibrating against mine. I edge away, closer to Christina, to break the connection.

  ‘I try to find her meaning, opening her up like drawers. But the truth is that the maiden and the mistress are both whores.’

  Christina lets the page fall into her lap. The poem is over. I take the opportunity to read it for myself. The end-of-line rhymes stand out down the page: cruel, stool; play, betray; eye, sly; make, forsake; and so on until the triumph of ‘drawers, whores’. I focus on them until I feel certain I won’t laugh, and then I risk glancing at Max: he is sitting very still, his face giving nothing away.