Mrs Gaskell and Me Page 8

  ‘Right,’ says David, ‘who wants to read for the second time?’

  There is a dead silence in the room. As it unfolds, I become aware first of the sound of traffic passing on the road outside, and then the creaking of floorboards all around us as, in other parts of the shop, customers buy books.

  Since beginning my Ph.D., I have become a connoisseur of the awkward silence. I know its variations, its moods, and its outcomes.

  In the doctoral seminar, we ride them out timorously, shame-facedly, after each presentation; nobody wants to be the one to ask the first question. This is an optimistic, teeth-gritted kind of silence: we know it will be broken and, more often than not, we know who will break it, because the doorsteps-in-Dickens girl has developed a reputation for being confident and remarkably persistent in her focus on ‘doorsteps’ in every literary genre, in every period of history. After seconds that feel, in that bated-breath quiet, like minutes, her voice will ring out like a school bell announcing the end of a lesson, and everybody relaxes.

  In my one-on-one meetings with Joyce, the awkward silence has a different, more acute quality. ‘Have you considered the influence of Swedenborg on Elizabeth Barrett Browning?’ she will say. ‘Do you think Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the aura of the artwork and mechanical reproduction is relevant to Harriet Hosmer’s neoclassical project?’ And I will sit and stare at my fingers gripping my pen, and at the page they are resting on, and at the words I have scribbled on the paper. I will implore my own brain to think, to say something smart, or just to say anything, and meanwhile the silence will settle over the room like weather. I feel it on my skin, clogging my pores and clouding my thoughts.

  And yet, for all my recent experience, the awkward silence of the Shakespeare and Company workshop after the first reading of Jason’s poem is striking: it is gloriously, agonizingly, stomach-churningly long. It takes on a sort of form in the room, a giant squatting amongst us, and all around it is the flickering and darting of the eyes of workshop participants, staring at each other, and down at the floor, and out of the window behind David’s head.

  ‘I’ll just read it myself,’ Jason says, and David looks so relieved to hear a human voice that he seems prepared to overlook the break with protocol.

  When Jason has finished, there is a beat that threatens to swell into the silence we suffered before. Then: ‘I thought the rhymes were really good,’ Millie says, cautiously.

  ‘I liked how, at the beginning, you gave a description of the appearance of the woman,’ says Brad. ‘You really painted a picture of what she looked like.’

  ‘I thought the language you used was really classic. Like a Shakespeare poem,’ says one of the British retirees.

  There is a lull and everyone looks tense until an elderly Englishman says, ‘I agree with Millie that the rhyme scheme is effective.’

  I wonder whether I, too, should speak to the effectiveness of the rhymes.

  ‘The thing is,’ says one of the American college girls, in a tone of voice that immediately makes me sit up a little straighter, ‘it’s just super-offensive. It’s like, totally sexist.’

  ‘It’s like,’ her friend says, ‘what century am I in? Hello? Did I fall asleep and wake up in 1950?’

  ‘Or, like, 1850?’ says the first girl.

  Christina sighs loudly, as though she has been holding her breath for a long time, and then says, ‘Honestly, I’m glad y’all have brought that up. I found it hard to read. It’s just really … it’s very negative and I personally found it distasteful.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says a man in a Breton-stripe top, with an ambiguous accent, ‘it seems like fairly standard-issue misogyny.’

  Suddenly everyone has something to contribute, and David has to speak over several other comments when he says, half-shouting, ‘Let’s take some time to remember that the speaker of the poem is separate from the author of the poem.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Max, ‘if this poem is written in the voice of a misogynist, Jason could really dramatize that, to show that he, as the poet, is in control of the narrative.’

  Max’s contribution seems to have calmed the room somewhat, and for the first time, I feel as though I have something to offer. I say, ‘Have you read Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”, Jason?’

  Jason ignores me. ‘You don’t get it at all,’ he says. ‘I’m writing from my personal experience of women. I’m writing about my experiences.’

  ‘Wow,’ says Christina, ‘just wow.’ She crosses her arms, which has the effect of shunting me back towards Jason. I squeeze my legs together and try to make myself as small as possible.

  ‘You have all misread my work,’ Jason says. ‘You’re letting your personal prejudices obstruct your appreciation of literature.’

  ‘What personal prejudice is that?’ says the Breton-top man. ‘That women are human beings?’

  ‘This is bullshit.’

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  The volume in the room is growing and growing until Christina says, not loudly but so shrilly that it cuts through the noise: ‘This is not how it was in the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald! This is not how they would have done it!’

  ‘If it helps,’ says Max, ‘it’s not the real Shakespeare and Company.’

  The workshop is over, and we are crossing the river on our way back to Shu’s apartment. He is holding my hand very tightly. I am feeling exhausted, deflated: in the moment, I thought the workshop was funny, found the characters around me and the squabbles entertaining; but now, back in the real world, it all strikes me as unbearably sad.

  I think about the Paris of Gertrude Stein – Picasso and Djuna Barnes and Matisse and Jean Rhys and all the others, walking the same streets at the same time – and shake my head. ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s not the real Shakespeare and Company.’

  ‘No, I mean, literally,’ Max says. ‘It’s literally not the real one. It’s a different location, different owner. They just named it after the original Shakespeare and Co., in the sixties, I think. It’s just a … an hommage. A replica after the fact.’

  We walk through a cloud of cigarette smoke, drifting up from the ashtray of a table outside a bistro.

  ‘It’s so sad to think of all these people coming to Paris to be part of something that doesn’t exist any more,’ I say.

  By now all the workshop participants will have dispersed around the city, to their Airbnb rentals and their garrets, to their laptops and their malfunctioning printers which will fail again, next week, to produce enough copies for everyone in the library room at Shakespeare and Company. Some of them will be writing again already, tapping away at their keyboards, and Jason will be smoking and looking sourly out of the window and thinking about how feminists have ruined art, and David will be sitting with his friends, or his girlfriend, saying he’s not sure he can carry on leading that workshop, man, those people get crazier by the week, and it’s disrupting his own creative process.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be sad,’ says Max. ‘People still find each other here. People still make new things. We’re here, aren’t we?’

  His hand is solid and hot in mine, as we turn onto Rue d’Aboukir, past the taxidermist’s window display of winged mice.

  1857

  Mr Charles Eliot Norton’s Guide to Rome and its Environs

  The Colosseum at Sunset

  It was a plan that kept being put off: first Mr Story was ill, and then Mr Norton, and then on the third attempt, you were all ready to go when one of Marianne’s headaches set in, and as the end of your time in Rome drew closer, you began to think it would never happen, this trip to the Colosseum at night. But it was truly worth it, Mr Norton said, to see how the stone arches threw shadows, lengthening first as the sun dropped lower and lower, how they crystallized in the moonlight. You could really feel, then, he said, the ghosts of Christian martyrs in the arena, could almost hear the roar of the old Roman crowds.

  On your penultimate night in the city, the plan finally cam
e together. You set off, bundled up in shawls and scarves. It was nearly summer, but the air was cold that evening, and the Storys insisted that the Colosseum was a sickly, deathly place. Their daughter, Edith, had almost died years ago after her first visit to see it. In the carriage on the way, you fussed over Meta and Marianne, and Mr Norton fussed over you, and wondered whether you should all go back for more layers. But as you drew up beside the ruins, you forgot about the cold and looked instead at the stone, gold in the last of the light, and Mr Norton said, ‘Yes, like this. This is the way to see it.’

  Inside the Colosseum, it was still. You couldn’t hear the clatter of carriages and horses’ hooves still passing on the road outside. You couldn’t hear church bells ringing. Wind blew over the broken walls and picked up the leaves and tendrils of creepers clinging to the stone. There was another group of visitors at the far end of the arena, but they were far away enough that they seemed less like people than the spectres Mr Norton had promised you’d meet.

  You watched your daughters weave amongst the rubble of the amphitheatre, and, later, their faces illuminated in torchlight as darkness fell. And it was then, as you were sitting surveying it all – their wondering, delighted expressions, the play of the flames against the ruins – that Mr Norton placed himself beside you and said, ‘Now is the time, Mrs Gaskell, for your ghost story.’ The auditorium was waiting, its empty seats hungry for occupants, its gigantic floor and underground passages poised to support a performance.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ you said. ‘It’s chilling enough, my tale, in the brightest daylight.’

  The Campagna

  The next morning, you hired a carriage to take you out. Meta and Marianne stayed at home to oversee packing, and you went with Mr Norton and Mr Field and Miss Hosmer, out beyond the city walls to the strange, undulating countryside beyond. There was an odd silence to the Campagna, even when the wind rolled over it, even when Mr Norton pointed out that the mounds in the land were not hillocks in the English sense, but bulges of ruins pushing up through the ground. He told the driver to stop the carriage and climbed down to show you: he dug a heel roughly into the grass, and turned up a fragment of pottery. When he did it again, he found a coin, glinting in the earth, and when he rubbed the dirt away and held it up for you to see, you read the name ‘CAESAR’ stamped on its side. The Campagna was a treasure chest.

  ‘My story,’ you said, as the carriage rolled on, ‘is about a young English bride. After her wedding she was tormented by a recurring dream. She would wake her new husband every night, crying out in her sleep. No matter what she did, no matter what medicine she took, she dreamt the same dream night after night, and it so frayed her nerves that she became exhausted and infirm.’

  ‘What was the dream?’ asked Mr Norton.

  ‘It was a dream,’ you said, ‘about a face.’

  The Palazzo Barberini and the Studio of William Wetmore Story

  ‘The bride’s husband took her to every doctor he could find,’ you said. ‘She tried sea bathing, and abstaining from tea, and bed rest, but nothing worked. Still, in her dreams, the face visited her and made her terrified. In the end, the husband decided, there was nothing left but to take her abroad, and see whether European air might cure her of her vision. He took her first to Paris, where she showed some small signs of improvement. A French doctor wrote the husband a letter of introduction to a medical man at Rome who was skilled in the healing of nervous disorders, and with this in hand, the couple set off for Italy.’

  The carriage had dropped you at the Palazzo Barberini, where you went to look one more time at Guido’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci: the girl’s red eyes stared hollowly out of the canvas and you insisted, again, that you thought it was depressing: more depressing than ever today, you thought, because tomorrow you were leaving and would never see it again. Mr Norton suggested that you visit Mr Story at work, ‘to see some real, living art in the making’. There was a grin on his face as he said this that made you wonder whether, perhaps, Mr Norton was as sceptical of Mr Story’s ‘real, living art’ as you were of the maudlin, morbid face of Beatrice Cenci.

  Together, with Mr Field and Miss Hosmer in tow, you left the cool air of the palazzo and waited a moment by the fountain for your eyes to adjust to the daylight. Gradually, the stones and creepers of the courtyard became dark and visible again.

  ‘And so,’ you continued, as you turned the corner onto the narrow little Via di San Nicola da Tolentino, ‘the husband brought his afflicted wife to Rome.’

  Mr Norton pointed out the doorway that led to the studio, and held it open for you. You stepped inside.

  Mr Story was at work on a clay model when you came into the main room, and for a while he pretended not to notice you were there. You hovered nearby, watching him frown and slide his hands over the head and shoulders of a glowering, hunched woman, and pinch her brows into a more profound glare. He hummed as he worked, a song you recognized from the pifferari’s playing on the Corso.

  ‘It’s Cleopatra,’ Mr Norton told you, and on hearing his voice, Mr Story looked up and beamed.

  ‘Friends!’ he said. ‘How long have you been standing there? I was so absorbed, I had no idea I had an audience!’

  You wandered between statues: Venus, naked, half-covering herself with limp hands; Medea, clutching a dagger, deep in thought. Mr Story pointed out the intricacies of the drapery, the historical accuracy of the costumes, the facial expressions that, he insisted, portrayed the spiritual life of his subjects.

  ‘You see, here,’ he said, gesturing at an amulet on the marble wrist of a large, squat woman, ‘it is these details, my dear friends, that have earned me my reputation as, not only a sculptor, but a poet too. My marble speaks a kind of poetry, people say.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Story,’ Mr Norton said. ‘Masterful. Yes. Poetic. The drapery is exquisitely done.’

  ‘For a while,’ you said, turning away, and talking loud enough that only Mr Norton could hear, ‘the wife felt better. The dreams stopped and she felt, finally, that she could breathe again. The Italian air seemed to be working. Rome had cured her of her dream.’

  The Pantheon

  It started to rain while you were inside, and the hole in the domed roof let down a curtain of droplets that splashed against the marble floor. You stood beneath it and felt the water on your face, the strangest feeling, to be rained on indoors, as though the weather had followed you in.

  After lunch, you had exchanged Mr Field and Miss Hosmer for Marianne and Meta, who had finished packing and wanted to visit the Pantheon: somehow, after three months in Rome, you had never been. This was your last chance. You watched your girls moving around the edges of the space, inspecting statues and reading aloud from their Murray’s Guide: ‘… the burial place of Raphael … The circular hall is one hundred and forty-two feet in diameter, exclusive of the walls …’ Mr Norton, after helping them find their way to Raphael’s tomb, behind the third chapel on the left-hand side, crossed the floor and stood beside you in the pillar of rain.

  ‘Where were we?’ you asked.

  ‘Rome had cured her of her dream,’ he said.

  ‘It had,’ you said, at once. ‘The bride was so much improved in Rome that at first the husband thought there was no need to visit the expert to whom they had been given a note of introduction. But as the end of their visit drew near, he decided to call upon the doctor and invite him to examine the bride, to be sure she was strong enough to go home. After extending the invitation, the husband returned to his hotel with the doctor, a handsome man with great, dark eyes and white hair. The wife came to the door of their suite to greet them, but on seeing the doctor’s face, she turned pale and fell down in a faint.’

  ‘It was the face from her dream?’ asked Mr Norton.

  ‘It was the face from her dream,’ you said, savouring the words.

  The Catacombs of St Calixtus

  Why would you not, on your final night in the city, go to the Catacombs? You had been all over Rome t
hat day, but there was a panicky, urgent feeling building in your chest that stopped you feeling tired: time was running out, and there was more to see, more to say.

  There were many steps down, and with each one you felt a little colder. The air around you was changing, shrinking, as you descended into the dark. You could feel Marianne behind you, and see Meta ahead, but the light from the torches was flickering and unstable, and for a moment it all seemed unreal, two-dimensional, like a painting, until you heard Mr Norton’s voice up ahead, ‘Can you see, here, the engravings of the early Christian martyrs in the rock?’

  The ground was wet underfoot as you padded through dark passages, between spaces cut into the rock. When you moved your light over it, you saw the white glow of human bone, lying in dirt centuries old. You waited for revulsion to set in, but looking on the hollow ribcages, the scattered clavicles, the skulls that sat emptily amid nests of dust, you felt only burning curiosity about these long-gone humans, who looked so vague now, and would once have been specific. Perhaps they, too, had wished for more time.

  When you emerged back into the evening air, breathless after the climb, you turned to Mr Norton and in a rush told him the rest of the story.

  ‘That night, the husband left his wife to rest while he went to dinner, and when he returned to their rooms he found she had vanished. He ran down and began to ask the hotel staff and people in the dining rooms whether they had seen his wife, where she had gone. He sent his maid, his manservant, the hotel porters out into the streets to search for her. They came back all telling the same tale: that there were reports all around the city of sightings of a young Englishwoman being driven away in a carriage in the company of the handsome Roman doctor. They had passed the city walls, and vanished into the Campagna. And she was never seen again.’