Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library (9 page)

SNOWMELT

Lane Ashfeldt

‘I had thought such ecstasy dead in me forever,
but the sun of Italy has thawed the frozen stream.’
Mary Shelley, ‘Rambles in Germany and Italy’, 1844

That winter, as snows fell on England and fires raged in Australia, as floods visited both countries, Miss Campbell became convinced the end was near.

She did not say so to neighbours or to people at the library, but the idea was not new to her. For months she had lived in fear of a plague. Scientists were on the alert for a new contagious disease. It was overdue. The next plague to hit would be rapid and deadly, they said. In deference to their opinions she filled two kitchen cupboards with tinned beans and bottled water, enough to survive a month without leaving her loft. She imagined her neighbours in the event of a quarantine. No ‘Blitz spirit’ for them: they’d be out looting the Tesco Express, the Boots, the Morrisons, even the all-night shop at the garage. When all obvious sources of food and medicine were exhausted, they would attack each other. Her only chance of survival would be to sit tight with her doors and windows locked.

But what form would this new plague take, Miss Campbell asked herself. The avian flu? Some sort of viral cancer? Perhaps, like the Black Death, it had sneaked in at the back door and was quietly multiplying as it fixed itself on the old, the weak and the young. Mr Shanahan, a regular at the library, had been hospitalised at Halloween for laser surgery on his eye. By Christmas he was gone. If she ever needed an operation she would choose day surgery; she did not wish to join the list of superbug victims.

Now, watching the burning bushes and frozen lakes, listening to the signs and portents that issued from her television screen, Miss Campbell began to think that the end of the world might after all be precipitated by something other than a plague. By extreme weather, perhaps: melted ice caps, fire and brimstone, a black sun.

She spent the morning boxing atlases and encyclopaedias. The building she’d worked in for fifteen years had closed its doors, and they had three days in which to stock the new library. Someone came into the reference room and called out, ‘Miss Campbell, you here?’ She popped her head out from behind the shelf and bumped into Angela from reception.

‘Oh. I’ve a caller asking for the head librarian, but Matt’s at a conference. He wants to know when he can set up those PCs in HeadSpace—’

‘HeadSpace?’

‘You know, the new zone for teenagers. He just needs to confirm an installation slot.’

Oh yes, the room Matt wouldn’t let her order any books for. Some grand scheme of his to ‘raise the footfall’ of young people.

‘Very well, I’ll speak to him.’

She took the phone and confirmed a time on Thursday.

‘Great. So they’ll be up and running ahead of the launch,’ Angela said.

‘Indeed.’

Miss Campbell found it hard to be enthusiastic. She’d hoped to stay on at the library another eight years, until retirement, but her role was changing so fast. Once, her job had been to share her love of books. Not any more. Books, actual physical books made of paper, were becoming a rarity, something to be tucked away in forgotten corners.

That lunchtime she came across a skip in the car park filled with old library hardbacks. Matt had enquired about stock disposal the other day. ‘Generally we donate,’ she said, but he told her, ‘There’s additional costs attached and we’re over budget on the move.’ She spent her lunch break standing on a chair, reaching into the skip to fish out books worth saving. Then she ferried them down the road to Oxfam. It seemed churlish given how much the council was spending, but Miss Campbell couldn’t help it: she was going to miss the old library.

The day of the move coincided with a day’s annual leave booked months ago. For weeks Miss Campbell had looked forward to this trip. She was taking an evening class on the early novel, and a visit to a library of early women’s writing was part of her studies.

Fresh snow had fallen and it glittered on the ground like a Christmas card. The train travelled back in time as swiftly as it raced through frozen fields and copses, until it reached a station whose platforms held no cafés, only painted wooden shelters and matching footbridges. The last stop: the end of the line.

Miss Campbell consulted her map and picked her way down the high street and through the small town, avoiding icy patches and lumps of trodden snow. When she reached the grounds of the house, the whole area was warm and dry. A meadow stretched snow-free and golden into the distance, and a man loaded bales of hay into the loft of a barn as if she’d happened on a small unseasonable patch of summer.

She rang the bell, signed in, climbed the uneven wooden steps and knocked on the library door. A simple room. Books, wooden desks, lamps. A concentrated silence that she longed to bottle and unleash in her own library.

She requested
The Last Man.

It was an early edition bound in three volumes. Leather edged, with marbled covers and a matching box. She slid the books out, noting that in 1826 the name Mary Shelley still did not appear. By then Percy had been dead a few years and her married name might have helped sales, but the credit was to ‘The Author of Frankenstein’. She placed the top book on the foam reader. It opened on the first page.

‘Hear you not the rushing sound of the coming tempest? Do you not behold the clouds open, and destruction lurid and dire pour down on the blasted earth? See you not the thunderbolt fall, and are deafened by the shout of heaven that follows its descent? Feel you not the earth quake and open with agonising groans, while the air is pregnant with shrieks and wailings – all announcing the last days of man?’
*

Miss Campbell rose from her seat in alarm. What if this passage from the third volume had revealed itself to her as a warning? A sign. Yes, that was it. The signs were here, but no one could read them. No one wanted to read them.

She hurried to the window, searching for what? A thunderbolt, a quake, a tempest? She half expected to watch the lawn rip asunder, but still it stretched away from the house, green and sunny.

She stood at the window as others had stood before her, going back four centuries. Even before the house existed, local thanes had lived in this area; and before them, Romans, drawn by a warmth they missed from the south.

She breathed deeply.

These ancient words, which might have filled her with terror had she read them alone in her flat at night, were not ready to come true just yet.

Miss Campbell returned to her seat, and to her work. The day passed swiftly, the sun racing across the south lawn to disappear behind the trees. She looked back as she closed the gate; the last light bathed the house and filled the air around it.

On the walk to the station the magic of bygone centuries receded. People on the high street did the same kind of thing people in Balham did — bought naan bread or focaccia, fruit or meat, wine or beer, as they wended their way home. On the train back to the city the sky closed over, a lid slammed on the world.

Descending the steps into the Underground, Miss Campbell was hit by its rich dirty stink. Metallic yet animal. A smell she’d not noticed this morning, it was so long since she’d breathed clean air.

That night she settled in front of her 1973 typewriter and began to type. Earlier she had put off this task, because how can you reduce a person to a few pages, a life and its work to five thousand words? Somehow she felt less wary of her subject now. Spurred on by the noisy rattle of the Golfball, she wrote of Mary Shelley’s dark loneliness; her struggles as a single parent; her visions of the end of the world, penned a hundred and fifty years before this typewriter was manufactured, and set another century beyond that in 2073.

‘Like
Frankenstein
and horror,’ Miss Campbell wrote, ‘The
Last Man
was conceived before science fiction was a genre, before others trod accepted paths into these strange new worlds. Before leaps in time became pedestrian. Mary Shelley’s vision of the future was very different from the one we have today. It had no place for gadgets such as the sonic screwdriver or the improbability drive…’

She typed far into the night, aware and yet unaware of time passing, pausing, rewinding, forwarding.

The following day the computers arrived, and by eleven Miss Campbell was in HeadSpace with the man who had come to install them. Matt, too, was there to see his vision take shape.

‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose.’

‘You don’t sound so sure.’

‘It’s just, we could fit thousands of books in this space, do you know?’

‘And I’m sure you know,’ he smiled, ‘that each computer allows its user to view an infinite number of virtual books?’ ‘No actual books, though.’

The man installing the machines looked up and the two men exchanged sympathetic glances. Matt declaimed as if a small crowd was gathered round to hear him: ‘Isn’t what an actual book
is
quite an arbitrary construct? Engravings, wooden tablets, scrolls, vellum sheets, paper: technology moves on, and we must move with it. Change doesn’t have to be a bad thing.’

‘I like computers,’ Miss Campbell said, ‘but I like books, too. And I don’t think computers can replace them.’

She looked up, curious to see how he’d respond, but by then Matt was sending text messages.

At the launch event she avoided him. Easily done. Matt was busy impressing the local government luminaries who had bankrolled his new library, telling them about the events planned to promote it. They clustered around him, looking even more ironed and dry-cleaned than the librarians, who were at pains to look their best. A champagne reception at work was a rare treat and they were out to make the most of it.

Angela followed Miss Campbell’s gaze.

‘He’s such a high flyer, Matt. I wonder, will he still be with us in six months, or will he move on to some other milestone project?’

‘Who cares?’ said one librarian.

‘Fine by me if he goes,’ said another. ‘We’ll cope without.’

‘He gave me a lecture last week on the benefits of change,’ Miss Campbell said. ‘I took him at his word. I’m selling my flat and moving out of London.’

‘Isn’t now a bad time to sell?’

‘Only the worst for thirty years, they say. But I’m not waiting thirty years for the next good time.’

There was a rush of questions about where she was moving to, and she told them.

‘Oh, not such a long commute,’ Angela said. ‘So you’ll stay on here? At the library I mean.’ The look she gave Miss Campbell said: don’t do anything foolish, my girl.

‘Like Matt says – change can be a good thing. There’s a little library out that way needs a volunteer. I’ll love the work, and if all goes well they’ll think of me when a paid vacancy comes up.’

Half disbelieving, half envious, they raised a toast to her new life and the conversation moved on. Later Angela took her to one side.

‘If you don’t mind my saying, I hope you’ve thought things through. Doesn’t pay to be too impulsive, does it?’

Miss Campbell thought of Mary Shelley. Always hard up. No wonder, since her menfolk were so careless with their finances -but she never let money take over. If she had done there’d be less of interest for a modern reader to learn about her now. As things stood, the time was ripe for a serious in-depth study, and she might just be the person to undertake it.

‘Doesn’t the danger lie in entrusting our future to others? Like bankers, I mean. Perhaps, Angela, we should take charge—’

‘Don’t bring “the recession” into this. I’m thinking of you, is all. You don’t want to make things hard on yourself.’

Miss Campbell smiled.

‘I’m thinking of me, too. I’m thinking, “I only have one life and it could end any time.” There are a few things I’d like to do before that happens, do you know?’

Light and shadow flickered across Miss Campbell’s face as the train passed a stand of bare-branched trees. Then, in the open fields, the sun steadied and she closed her eyes to focus on its warmth. Already the journey felt familiar. This time she was going south to look for a flat. She had boxed her things in readiness; early that morning a man from Oxfam had come to collect her donation.

‘Not the kind of stuff we normally get. Gone off beans, then, have you?’ he asked as he lifted the crates of tinned food.

Miss Campbell smiled. She’d stopped believing there was much point in preparing for a plague or for the end of the world. If it came, it came.

He nodded towards the cardboard boxes. ‘Those old hardbacks, you’ll be wanting them gone too, my love?’

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I’ll be needing those.’

The train continued south at a leisurely pace. In the sunlight the snow softened and began to dissipate. Brooks and streams, unfrozen, grew brown with snowmelt and brimmed over to lap at fields, their eager ripples forming new and temporary lakes.

My inspiration:
The inspiration for this story came from a visit to Chawton House Library one snowy day in February, 2009, to read works by Mary Shelley.
Snowmelt
was also shaped by other recent events in my life and in the world of books, and by a conversation with Chawton House librarian, Jacqui Grainger.