Mrs Gaskell and Me Page 9

  Spithöver’s English Bookshop, 85 Piazza di Spagna

  On the morning of your departure, you went to the English Bookshop in the Piazza di Spagna on the pretence of wanting to buy photographs of monuments to take home for Mr Gaskell. Mr Norton had told you that Spithöver’s was the best place for souvenirs, and so you asked him to take you there.

  You went early, right after breakfast, and the artist’s models were still crowded on the Spanish Steps in clusters, waiting for painters to hire them. A group of women stood together, all dressed as Mary Magdalene and holding grief-stricken, mournful poses. Higher up was a gathering of scheming Judas Iscariots. Their shadows slithered down the steps below them. A few shabbily dressed, paint-stained young men paced around between the groups, eyeing the postures and calling out to ask the models’ rates.

  Spithöver’s was dark inside, and it took a moment for your eyes to make out the rows of Murray’s guides and copies of Byron and Corinne lining the shelves.

  ‘Here,’ said Mr Norton, presenting you with a bound collection of photographs. ‘This has all the significant sights – the Colosseum, the Forum. And, in addition, a copy of your favourite Guido portrait.’

  You were distracted and didn’t smile. ‘Yes,’ you said. ‘Maybe.’ And then you saw it, bright and new, freshly stocked, your own name shining on the spine: The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Mrs. Gaskell, Vol. 1, The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Mrs. Gaskell, Vol. 2. It gave you a thrill to see – half pleasure, half anxiety – and you reached to take the two volumes down, one after the other.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Mr Norton.

  You handed it to him. ‘A gift,’ you said. ‘For when you miss my ghost stories.’

  In a few hours, you would commence the reverse of the journey you had made only three months earlier, but which seemed to have happened to a different person altogether, a different Mrs Gaskell. Soon you would be in Marseille, and then in Paris, and then in Calais, and then in London, and then – your stomach tightened – in Manchester, in the house on Plymouth Grove, and the bed you shared with Mr Gaskell. You would be returned to that old life, the one that had been yours when you wrote the book that was, now, open in the palm of Mr Norton.

  He read the title page with a broad smile, then closed and stroked the cover as though it were a small animal in his hands.

  ‘I hope you know that I plan to give myself very little opportunity to miss you, Mrs Gaskell.’

  ‘You’ll come to Manchester?’

  ‘As soon as I can.’

  You nodded. ‘Yes. Good.’

  It was quiet in the bookshop. Mr Spithöver was nowhere to be seen. You looked around half-heartedly for someone to take your money for the book, but were relieved when nobody came. The longer it took, the longer you could spend in the hushed sanctuary of the shop, away from the bustle at the Casa Cabrale and the panicked requests of your daughters for last-minute visits or purchases, from the reality of the matter: that you were leaving. That tomorrow there would be no coffee with Mr Norton on the loggia, nor the day after that, nor the day after that.

  ‘It breaks my heart to leave Rome.’

  ‘I will see you again soon,’ he said. ‘I promise. I promise.’

  Part Two

  SALIVA STUDY

  2015

  Procrastination: Three Techniques

  One: Become Lucky

  The Internet is a catalogue of unlikely opportunity. I am in the habit, now, a year and a half into my Ph.D., of sitting in the Rare Books Reading Room, surrounded by journals and volumes and tomes I am not reading, and instead, entering competitions online. The best sites for this are the women’s magazines – Vogue, Elle, Glamour – who tantalize with the possibilities of luxury: bright, glossy pictures of happy, skinny people. The web pages feature airbrushed models holding up handbags or make-up, wearing expensive clothes, and below the photographs, a simple form. Enter your email address for a chance to win. I have become expert at answering questions constructed by PR teams to force the internalization of marketing messages. Where did such-and-such a designer look for inspiration for her new collection? A – Philadelphia, B – Texas, C – Barcelona? Give me free holidays. New wardrobes. Phones. Two tickets to see a show and an overnight stay in a five-star hotel.

  The word count of my thesis has not budged in weeks. It is visible at the bottom of a document that sticks out beneath the Internet browser: a real, ignorable fact. Better, surely, to live in the realm of the imaginary, to think that perhaps good things will be given to me for free, that I will not have to work for it, because I’ve tried working, really truly I have, and it hasn’t worked at all.

  It is the second semester of my second year at King’s. I have spent a year and five months purportedly researching the expatriate artistic community in mid-to-late-nineteenth-century Rome, and I have never felt less interested, or less inspired. My days have become grindingly repetitive: the commute from home to the library, the same librarians behind the Issue and Returns desk, the same people with the same annoying coughs and sniffs and tics all around me in the reading room, the same over-priced coffee from the second-floor cafe.

  Two: Time Travel

  I daydream about the future and the past in equal measure. I think about last summer, which I spent with Max in Boston. I taught a class at BU, which paid for the flight from London and provided an excuse I could give to Joyce about why I’d be unavailable for supervision for three whole months. In the afternoons, when my classes were over and the students had dispersed, Max and I would work on our writing in air-conditioned cafes, and in the evenings we’d cook, we’d see movies, we’d do the things that normal couples do when they live in the same country, the same city. We went out to eat a lot at Lineage, the restaurant where we’d had our first, awkward non-date; we had a favourite table there, and always ordered fish tacos. At the end of each working week, Max would collect me from campus in his little grey car, and we’d drive south to his family’s cottage by the beach on Cape Cod. It was the longest we had ever spent in each other’s company, an uninterrupted stretch of summer. I had worried beforehand that we might struggle to live together after being apart for so long, but I couldn’t get tired of him. I was endlessly delighted: by his body, his voice, the way he thought and moved and said, ‘I love you,’ all the time, as though it was a form of punctuation. We ate lobster rolls and lay on the sand and listened to the waves and said to each other, over and over, differing versions of: this is the life we want; this; just this; just you and me and whatever else comes our way.

  But I was becoming frantic, even then, about the future: once Max left Paris, we had begun a transatlantic affair that exhausted us both. I applied for conferences, scholarships, anything that would pay for me to get to America. He scrimped and saved, doing odd jobs and painting houses, to afford the flights to London. Then I started teaching undergraduate classes at King’s, and couldn’t visit him; and then he started teaching undergraduate classes at BU, and couldn’t visit me. The daily Skype calls we had begun while he was in France became an inconvenience: the five-hour time difference meant that it was either too early for him, interrupting his working day, or too late for me, keeping me up. And so, while I was in Boston over the summer, I was full of schemes and plans to ensure that our separation wouldn’t be indefinite, that there was an end in sight.

  I would finish my Ph.D. by the middle of 2016. I would be free, then, to move to Boston, and we could start our life there, together, really together. We sat on the porch of the beach cottage, looking out at the ocean, and my heart thudded in my chest as I set out this timeline to Max and said, ‘There’s just one thing, though.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘If I come to Boston, if I’m going to move to Boston, permanently, I’d need, you know, a green card.’

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  The cottage on Cape Cod had belonged to Max’s family for several decades: inside, it was an archive of old black-and-white photos of his grandparents and gr
eat-grandparents, of marriage certificates, domestic paraphernalia, artefacts left behind by generation after generation of this American family around whose edges I was hovering.

  I swallowed. ‘So that would mean, you know, that we’d have to get married.’

  I couldn’t look at him as I said this. I covered my face with my hands and squeezed my eyes shut. Then I felt him reaching out and peeling my fingers back. I squinted up at him. His expression was confused, and I thought, I’ve freaked him out, I’ve been too pushy.

  ‘I thought,’ he said, and then stopped. ‘I thought that was obvious. I thought that was already the plan.’

  ‘It was?’ I said, and he said, again, that yes, of course, he’d always thought we would get married when I finished my Ph.D. The casualness with which he says this, the look of bemusement on his face at my anxiety, astonishes and delights me. This momentous thing is obvious to him, a given: we will spend our lives together.

  And so, when I am not reminiscing about the summer, I am fantasizing about the future. This is a life I was never before sure would be mine: gold band encircling my ring finger. Things that were never interesting to me begin to hold a strange, relevant fascination: I notice when my old classmates from school post pictures online of themselves in white dresses, clutching bouquets; I scrutinize the photographs. A leaflet posted on a noticeboard in a cafe near my house, advertising a nearby stately home as a wedding venue, which previously I would not even have stopped to read, I now ponder. I imagine what it would be like to get married there, to be the sort of person who gets married in a stately home.

  I am going to marry Max. That thing that other people do – where they get dressed up and say they love each other in front of their family and friends – I am going to do that with Max. After that, we will have children, because that is what always happens next, and what I have always assumed I will do, and what, I am realizing now, I want to do. He and I will move into a house in Boston or London or LA or Paris and create more people to live in it with us. I imagine them, too: our future progeny, pink and scrunched, his nose, my eyes, the best of each of us. It is fascinating and delightful to me, the thought that this can be mine, that I will participate in the same series of pre-ordered choices as everyone else, and be happy doing so. I am going to marry Max, and I am going to become a mother.

  At the end of the summer, when I was about to leave Boston and was standing in the international departures terminal at Logan Airport gasping with tears and desperate to delay the moment I had to walk through security and away from Max, a TSA agent came up to us.

  ‘Who’s leaving?’ he asked.

  Sniffing, I raised a hand and said, ‘Me.’

  ‘You’re not gonna see each other for how long?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I wailed, and Max said, ‘A few months, probably.’

  ‘Where you from?’ he asked me.

  I said, ‘London,’ through tears, as though it was the most tragic place anyone could possibly live.

  The agent nodded sympathetically and told Max he could go back to the checkin desk and ask for a security pass, which would mean he could come with me to the gate. ‘You can put her right on the plane,’ the agent said. Max was willing to do it, but I shook my head and wiped my eyes, suddenly embarrassed about crying and making a fuss.

  The agent frowned, shrugged and turned to Max. ‘Next time, you better put a ring on it, my friend.’

  ‘I will,’ Max said, sounding apologetic. ‘I really will.’

  On the other side of the security check, I saw the same agent again, who gave me a nod of recognition, a thumbs-up, and then pointed at his ring finger enthusiastically.

  Three: Consider alternative paths

  Perhaps, after all, this Ph.D. is not worth my while. I think back to that day in the Louvre when Max had told me to write about what moved me. It had felt like a breakthrough. But when I gaze at my surroundings in the Rare Books Reading Room, that clarity of purpose dims. The world inhabited by my subjects still seems bright and seductive, and the subjects themselves – the Brownings and Harriet Hosmer and William Story and, above all, Mrs Gaskell – are still alive to me. The more I know of them, the more I love them. But I couldn’t be further from them, here at my desk in the British Library. My solitary student life could not be more different to the Roman days they spent together, creating, collaborating, loving each other.

  My research is laborious and unrewarding: I am clawing at an enormous cliff face, hoping to tunnel through it, but the rock is unbreakable. My Anglistica & Americana book is ragged with re-reading; I know sections of the letters by heart. But the more familiar I become with my subjects and their work, the less certain I am that I have anything of academic value to say. The enormity of the task ahead – writing 100,000 words of pure, never-known-before knowledge – is off-putting, impossible, preferably avoidable.

  I look up jobs all the time: colleges in Massachusetts that need writing tutors, arts charities that need coordinators, anything, really, that would offer a good enough excuse to walk away from my research in London and run, instead, to a new life with Max in Boston. In less despairing moments I go back to applying for Ph.D.-related events in the US. I am not fussy about where. I apply for conferences in New York, workshops in LA, a research fellowship in Texas. Anywhere there would be nearer to Max than here.

  I am tired of being alone all the time, of conversations on Skype in which we tell each other about our days in desperate and minute detail, just for the sake of having something to say. I want a real life, shared with a real human, not just a cipher on a screen.

  It is through all my rigorous applying for things – jobs, fellowships, grants – that I get sucked into the world of online competitions. I am throwing my hat into so many rings that a few more seem entirely worthwhile. Consider me, I am saying to the universe, daily, hourly. Pick me for a change, a transformation, a luxury spa weekend for two.

  1857

  Hornets’ Nest

  The front door of the house at Plymouth Grove looked just how it had when you left, and yet, somehow, though you knew it couldn’t be, darker. It was drizzling as the hackney carriage pulled up outside the house; perhaps it was the effect of damp on the wood panels that made it seem that way. You followed your daughters down the drive; they were running, skipping through the rain. It felt to you that you were moving through flood water, that whatever sense of duty and inevitability was propelling you forwards was fighting a weaker but frantic desire to turn around, to get back in the carriage and drive away. The front door opened. The girls ran through. You followed them, and even inside, as you shook off the bad weather and the journey’s cramps in the hallway, the place seemed dim.

  Marianne, at least, was happy to be home, and ran down to the kitchen to see her beloved maid, Hearn. Meta, you thought, must be feeling similar to you: she looked perplexed as she surveyed the familiar furniture of the parlour, and reached out an uncertain hand to touch the fabric of the drapes.

  ‘Can you believe, Mama, it was only days ago we were in Rome?’

  You could not, you said, and yet there was part of you that still, for all that, could not believe that you were not in Rome, could not believe that you were instead in Manchester, damp from the journey and listening to the bustle of the servants bringing in your things and seeing, there, in the doorway of his study, a man with a thick, greying beard and dim-eyed smile. You could not believe that that man was your husband.

  ‘Welcome home,’ said Mr Gaskell, and even in his deep, assured voice, the word ‘home’ sounded uncertain.

  You had been good about writing to him at first. Your early weeks in Rome had been full of letters: you told him about the places you were visiting and the people you were meeting and the stories they were telling you. You had known that he expected this, but also enjoyed it, that though he was scared of travel himself, and suspicious of foreign foods in particular, he was curious too, about other places. But by your second month away it seemed there was simply
not much left to say. You had told him about all the most important sites, and had described all your new friends, had sent little sketches of the Casa Cabrale breakfasts, of Miss Hosmer charging down the Corso on her horse, Mr Story chewing his pipe at his desk, Mr Browning talking to his little eight-year-old son Pen as though he was an adult, and Mrs Browning talking to the same child as though he was barely two. You had described paintings and statues and churches and the strange, wide landscape of the Campagna. What more was there to say?

  Except that now, alone with your husband on your first night back, the gaps between your letters, and their absence altogether in the past few weeks, seemed to take the form of a thick silence in the bedroom. It was crushing, and awkward – it made the room feel too small – and you hoped he would say nothing about it, and talk instead about Manchester, and whatever had been happening at the Cross Street Chapel, about his parishioners perhaps. You had told him all you could tell him about Rome.

  But of course, in his direct, predictable way, he said, instead, ‘How was Rome?’

  You took a slow breath. You mulled over responses. It could be ‘wonderful’, or ‘fine’. It could be ‘lovely, but tiresome after a while’. The parties, the company, the busy, bustling breakfasts – it was exhausting, really, wasn’t it? You could try to formulate some sort of falsehood about being happy to have left. But you could say none of these things.

  ‘How are you, William?’

  He cleared his throat and looked away from you.

  ‘There has been some business here, while you have been away,’ he said. He sat, heavily, on the bed. ‘Some business about your book. The Brontë book. I have tried to handle it in your absence. I have tried not to bother you with it. But now you are home so it’s right you should know.’

  You thought, then, of Spithöver’s bookshop, of the shadowy shelves and the piazza gleaming through the windows, and the artist’s models massing on the Spanish Steps. Your book had been there. You had held it yourself, and handed it to Mr Norton. It had been there, and yet all the attendant worry, which you had known, after all, was coming – you had sensed and feared it – had been oddly absent. It had been only the good, the lovely fact of the words on the page, that existed in Rome.