The House of Breathing Page 11

  Mary closes her eyes and knows, as mothers are reputed instinctually to know such things, that the baby will die. She feels the small weight redistributed upon her chest. The hands of Mrs Blenkinsop. A darkness gathering in her belly most plausibly attributable to premonitions of grief.

  Had she been better clairvoyant Mary Wollstonecraft would have known that her daughter Mary would live for fifty-three years and achieve a fame ratified in the twentieth century by that most pompous and preposterous of all institutions, Hollywood. ‘The Rights of Women’ will historically prove a difficult concept; her daughter’s ‘Frankenstein’, however, is a convenient cultural nightmare, delectably beastly and radiantly terrifying. Adults will flinch and clutch one another in the face of Mary Shelley’s confected monstrosity. Children in dark rows will tremble and become intoxicated with fear. Organ music, tenebrous bedrooms, dark-and-stormy-nights, will unaccountably perpetuate.

  But now, at this moment, mother Mary can imagine no parturition more terrible, no fiction more cruel, than that which she has recently, factually experienced. She feels she has been gouged.

  Blood is somewhere staining the white linen bedclothes. And Mrs Blenkinsop continues, indefatigable and persnickety, to juggle and arrange the uncompliant infant.

  VII

  In this fluid and rather precarious state she remembers her second attempt at suicide.

  Imlay had cast her off, and installed, in hasty secrecy, a mistress in her place. He was indifferent to Fanny, and found Mary Wollstonecraft’s Passion alarmingly Presumptuous and Unbecoming of a Woman.

  It rained incessantly. She walked into a wet dark so densely streaming that her very substance seemed to yield to the pleasures of dilution. Unsustained by Love she gazed into the accelerating waters of the Thames, the channels and rivulets and ripples of which were gleaming dully under the spectral attention of the floating moon. Battersea bridge was far too crowded, so Mary, Rationally intent, hired a boat to take her further up the Thames to Putney. The boat-master expressed class-conscious surprise: that so decent a woman should be afield and alone on a night such as this! Mary lowered her gaze; she hoped that this deferential, compassionate fellow, with reddish coloured whiskers and scabby hands, would not be the one who, in the morning, with long spiked sticks, would finally skewer and recover her drifting body.

  At the second bridge she walked once again in the rain. It was important, she knew, to execute this carefully; waterlogged clothes would expedite quick submersion. She climbed the railing of the bridge and flung herself into the water. Currents embraced her. The cold was extraordinary. But Mary realised, to her dismay, that her large dress had ballooned up around her body, that she was buoyed and bobbed by the semi-globe of her abundant and Womanish clothes. She beat down her bloated dress with frantic impatience and gradually, mercifully, the water began to take her. She felt her mouth inundate. She gulped at the river. She breathed in whole draughts of black liquid to her lungs. And then, complete darkness.

  Some instant hero or other foiled this death. Some ordinary Englishman dived into the Thames and dragged the drowning woman—whose clothes, he later remarked, made her exceedingly heavy, not at all the flimsy Ophelia one might be tempted to imagine—and wrenched her dripping body definitively lifewards.

  VIII

  Godwin is there, hovering beside the candle, head intimately inclined to kind Mrs Blenkinsop. Mary watches them converse in soft hushed tones; they appear conspiratorial, as though they discuss, perhaps, the death of the baby, and are conferring on how best to inform the mother. Godwin also has his look of scholarly perplexity; the famous author of Political Justice is perhaps considering in what manner of humane and just terms he might announce to his wife the baby’s demise.

  But no, she is mistaken. The baby is merely asleep in the cradle beside her, calm and somehow securely life-tenanted. Mary closes her eyes and cannot at all understand the profundity of her sense of closening doom.

  Later—but it may have been seconds—the two are still there talking. Mary watches Godwin’s mouth and remembers his speeches and writings on the many and various iniquities of marriage. She remembers this statement:

  … marriage, as now understood, is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive and vigorous. So long as I seek, by despotic and artificial means, to maintain my possession of a woman, I am guilty of the most odious selfishness.

  The despot is fiddling with a gobbet of candlewax. Mary knows she is in Love. She is anti-Rational. She dwells on the lips of the man whom, only recently, her own body enormous with the burgeoning baby, she kissed and kissed to the very brink of obscenity.

  IX

  Once or twice they brought Fanny into the room to see her. She is a pretty child of precocious intelligence and with a will to survive proven impressively by her early defeat of smallpox. Mary speculates a famous future for her daughter, whom she does not consider in any way illegitimate. She stares at her child and sees Imlay vestigial in its three year old features.

  The birth of Fanny had been simple and uncomplicated. After a single day’s confinement Mary was up and about, carrying the new baby on walks in the sunshine. She felt, momentarily, completely happy. In a joyous letter she wrote: ‘my little girl begins to suck so manfully that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of The Rights of Women!’ And she chuckled as her quill sped its words across the page.

  The child Fanny now enquires of the whereabouts of William Godwin, whom she oddly and endearingly calls by the name of ‘Man’. She seems perplexed by her mother’s inexplicable misery, and is, in this perplexity, preoccupied and somewhat fidgety. She runs her small fingers around the monogrammed letters stitched in creme silk upon the white linen sheets: ‘M’ rightway up and upsidedown.

  (Fanny is beginning to assume the quality of ‘cadaverous quiet’ which Coleridge will later note in the ‘Godwin’ daughters.)

  Finding Man absent, she can think of nothing to say to her ailing mother. She continues tracing the peaks and valleys of the embroidered letters. There is sepulchral silence.

  On the ninth of October, 1816, Miss Fanny Godwin, aged twenty-two years, having discovered at last the fact of her Illegitimacy, committed suicide by the ingestion of too much opium. Her name was somehow torn from her suicide note, so that her identity was not recorded in the local papers. William Godwin forbade the claiming of the body. No one, it is recorded, attended the anonymous funeral. And younger sister Mary forgot, apparently, to register the melancholy event in her private journal.

  X

  Mrs Blenkinsop is leaning above her with a cloth soaked in warm rose water and the attitude of a pietà. Her eyes are remarkably close and concerned. She frowns as she dabs and dabs and dabs, as though committed to the removal of an unseemly public stain spilt upon the brow.

  Mary remembers, now, her own long-deceased mother. She remembers Elizabeth Dixon of Ballyshannon, and how, on one of those mortifying childhood nights, she leant above her thus, dabbing and dabbing. Her father had flung, not his fists this time, but a pewter mug. It flew through the air like a bizarre metal weapon—she seemed to see it as though its motion were preternaturally slow, as though the very angle of its descent and rate of its velocity were retarded by Nature for her own terrified inspection—and extended efficiently the arm of brutality. Brown ale sprayed down on them. And then it struck. Mary saw her own mother suddenly blench and topple backwards, heard a clang of collision, witnessed maternal collapse. Edward Wollstonecraft, in response, spat out imprecations and slammed the door behind him. The china objects in the dresser rattled at his exit. Cups tilted and swung. The cat leapt sideways. The whole world, it seemed, was sent constitutionally atrembling in his wake.

  At first Mary thought that her mother was dead. ‘Dead’, she whispered almost salaciously to herself,
savouring the word for its stunning finality. But then the woman roused. She uttered arcane syllables which Mary realised were remnants of her indigenous Irish. Sister Elizabeth (always the practical one) appeared with a linen cloth soaked in warm water. And so Mary bent above her mother, dabbing and dabbing at the red blood that welled from the poor woman’s wound. There was a pungent stench of ale which, even more than blood, she sought to eradicate. And her mother opened her eyes—they were Mrs Blenkinsop’s blue—and whispered, in Irish-inflected tones, ‘Ah Mary, me love thank God, thank God’.

  The rose water is almost overwhelming in its scent. Striving in her abasement for clear Rationality, Mary decides she must be entering a state of delirium since she could swear that it is blood that is issuing in copious floods from her flaming brow.

  XI

  For no apparent reason she requests a mirror. ‘A mirror, if you please, Mrs Blenkinsop. A mirror.’

  So proud, she was. Everyone was speaking of the Rights of Women. Mary posed for another portrait by the artist Sir John Opie, and felt herself becoming more and more substantial by the minute. She had donned her favourite striped gown, placed a simple scarf at her head, and refusing all manner of ornament and frippery, had contrived to appear the very figure of Contemplative Reason. Sir John painted her seated at her own writing bureau; she held open her own book, and turned to the artist as though thoroughly and warmly commending its contents. A quill and an inkbottle, her only accessories, appeared with contrived austerity in the middle distance background.

  Mary watched Sir John Opie judiciously dabble his brush, lean back, pause, and lean forward restrainedly to add another brushstroke to her famous countenance. She hoped that the portrait would show her sagacious and earnest. He leant back and forward, forward and back, and Mary’s eyes strayed to the page upon which was written, as it happened, a paragraph considered by her critics one of the most unforgivably blasphemous:

  Probably the prevailing opinion that woman was created for men, may have taken its rise from Moses’ poetical story; yet as very few, it is presumed, who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject ever supposed that Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam’s ribs, the deduction must be allowed to fall to the ground, or only be so far admitted as it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to show that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke, because the whole of creation was only created for his convenience and pleasure.

  Mary smiled at her boldness. The ‘convenience’ of ‘subjugation’: such a felicitous turn of phrase.

  Mrs Blenkinsop has returned. ‘Mr Godwin’, she announces (in a manner unbecomingly stiff and formal), ‘has refused Mrs Godwin all access to mirrors’. Then she bobs a half curtsey, apparently apologetic, turns and retreats.

  XII

  She knows about death and senses its proximity.

  This was a woman, this Mary Wollstonecraft, who from her window in Paris in 1793 had seen King Louis XVI bound tight in a hackney coach on his way to the guillotine. She had walked in the dark streets and found pools of shining blood sprung directly from the necks of counter-revolutionists and Girondins. Tumbrels rumbled in her mind and the triangular blade daily and actually fell. The Terror was abroad, barbarous and behemothic.

  In her dank little room Mary recorded for posterity that for the first time in her life she could not extinguish the candle on her nightly retirement. Darkness was already the pervading Genius. She lifted her pen and wondered how Reason had so rapidly evolved to Unreason. Tom Paine was held in a Paris prison—having argued in a tribunal against the King’s death—and would miss the guillotine by the merest good fortune. Soon Charlotte Corday would eliminate Marat, and for this act pay with an execution of rare and unprecedented publicity. Mary’s dear friend Madam Roland would also succumb. So each night under the candle which she did not dare snuff out, she crossed through those names of her revolutionary comrades who, in a History now adventitious, unamenable and perverse, had been dealt ruination.

  Gilbert Imlay appeared. He was miraculously sexual and individual. He spoke with an incontrovertible American accent. Smiled full-teethed in the face of History. Commanded. Seduced. Took control. He suggested removal from the various dangers and despondencies of Paris to a cottage in the forest near the town of Neuilly. Mary gathered up the remnants of her sad life and fled.

  Yet even in the circle of her lover’s arms, even in the range of his regular breath, in the warm and encompassing regime of his skin, she let the candle burn on, refused its snuffing, let it burn and burn until it deformed, guttered, and sank ever so silently, into its own collapsed wax.

  William Godwin and Mrs Blenkinsop are hovering beside the candle, speaking in hushed tones. Perhaps, Mary thinks, the baby has died. Perhaps they are conferring on how easily and how best to convey this sad intelligence to the ailing mother.

  XIII

  There was never sublimity, but there were books.

  In her small home in the town of Beverley in Yorkshire, where she spent the tempestuous years of adolescence, Mary became divided. In the house all was rage. Bodies were vulnerable, minds infirm. Her father externalised his own intemperate misery, tearing madly at curtains, flinging solid objects, upsetting the table. In the corner—for she was always, it seemed, lodged meekly in the corner—mother Elizabeth curled tightly around the body of her sixth baby, who cried and cried and cried evermore. Siblings screamed noisily at the brawls before them. And Mary called upon Heaven, with an immodest conviction of her own Propriety and Virtue, to smite her father dead instantly with a bright stroke of jagged lightning aimed directly at the heart.

  Outside was quite Other, and another, more poised Mary came into being. Disencumbered of brothers and sisters and homely iniquities, she would escape to the realm of Nature, and converse privately and specifically with the real father, God. From the top of the hill she could see the mediaeval church of Beverley and its perfect spire. All was right—at some level—with the state of the world. On the outside, too, Mary read quietly and industriously the bundles of books she had borrowed. She cohabited with personages plucked from fiction. She discoursed with philosophers, debated with translated Greeks, dallianced with foreigners, journeyers, God-fearers and reprobates. Sweet, sweet Reason. Outside, under the trees, overlooking the church, far, far from the wailing of several babies, Mary read and contemplated and decided peremptorily—and not, that is, without singular Good Reason—on the far superior claims of the intellect.

  XIV

  Ah, Godwin. He had enclosed her in his arms. He had gently kissed with his tongue the soft lobe of her ear. He had slid his lips towards hers, rapturously careful, and completed with the gravity of an extenuated kiss. Mary felt herself transform. Her own body was blossoming, becoming sapfilled, convoluted, roseate and petal-like. She opened her eyes and saw that he lay close beside her in a kind of relaxed and glorious repose. Beyond the boundaries of their bed (framed at two ends by iron-work ivy) was a marble wash-stand and jug, a bookshelf crammed with books, drawn curtains of brocade and an oak mantelpiece upon which stood two silver candlesticks and a European clock which swung with sobriety its true and regular pendulum. There was a fireplace just lit, a worn Turkish rug, and a black cat named Jean Jacques curled comfortably spherical. Mary saw it all, this cosy inventory of familiar domestica, with utter lucidity. Not only her own body but the world, too, was suddenly more authoritatively placed in existence, more accomplished, regenerate.

  ‘Mary’, he whispered, ‘Mary, Mary’.

  Then he covered her again, played suavely and attentively at the bloom of her body, coaxed incense, resonance, a totality of swoons.

  Later, as they lay apart, he began to joke. Replaying the derisive slander of the English press William Godwin teased her: ‘Imperious Amazon’, he said half smiling. ‘Hyena in Petticoats’; ‘Godless Whore’; ‘Philosophising Serp
ent’; ‘Shameless Wanton’.

  The last he pronounced with such an exaggerated and ingratiating mock distaste that Mary broke into laughter. She leapt in an excess of good humour and pleasure upon her lover’s naked body. And the two rolled together, tumbled right off the bed and onto the worn Turkish rug, and turned and turned, subversively hilarious.

  XV

  Mary can faintly hear the voice of kind Mrs Blenkinsop. ‘Dear God’, she is saying, ‘dear God, dear God’, in a tone that sounds very like distress and lamentation.

  Mary opens her eyes. Mrs Blenkinsop is standing at the back of the room, and looming above her is Dr Fordyce, who has apparently replaced the midwife’s ministrations.

  Dr Fordyce is busy arranging, with veterinary firmness, a small brown puppy upon each breast.

  ‘These will draw out the milk’, he explains abruptly, noting the patient’s return to inquisitive consciousness.

  Mary is abased. Mary is quaking and in a state of revulsion. The animals writhe at her chest, imposing anguish. She looks at their paws, their honey eyes, and their tiny tongues, and wonders what has become of her own infant, Mary. She feels animal mouths rudely and frantically suckle. She cannot believe her own body has been thus abused and exposed.

  When she is next in consciousness Dr Carlyle is there, and later still the surgeon, Mr Clarke, is in attendance. This is an ominous gathering. They bend above her with looks of studious annoyance. Whisper. Confer.

  And she thinks only of the puppies, their warmth, their misplacement, their disgusting hunger.

  XVI

  Let us not pretend that there is some moment of relief or restitution. The death is miserable. Godwin tips glass after glass of sweet sherry down her throat, so that it may be said she is becoming absolutely drunken. She sees the room start to reel. Several of her women friends stand in a circle around the bed—Maria, Eliza, Everina, Amelia—and they bear on their faces the prefiguring of her doom. Something in their expressions discloses the irrevocable.