Serial Monogamy (12 page)

“D
o you have any mutton?”

“We have lamb, miss. Nice spring lamb.”

“Yes, I know. It's always called lamb, but I wonder, would any of it really be mutton?”

“Certainly not, miss.” The man behind the butcher counter looked offended at Shay's question. “I have fresh spring lamb today, not more than six months old, arrived from Wales this morning. Mutton is the meat of an adult sheep.”

“And you don't have any?”

“There's no call for it any more. I have to order it in special.”

“Does it taste any different? I'm making a recipe from an old cookbook and it calls for mutton.”

“It takes a good bit of stewing and it's gamier, stronger flavour. Some people like it. I can order it in.” The butcher's tone softened as soon as he realized he was not being accused of passing off old mutton as young lamb.

“No, unfortunately, I'm cooking it tonight. I guess I'll take the lamb. I need enough for six.”

“Have the New Zealand, from the freezer,” he said, gesturing in that direction. “It's always older and it'll have a bit more of that flavour you're looking for. Cheaper too.”

Shay purchased her New Zealand lamb and moved on to the greengrocer feeling rather important and highly competent, an adult woman discussing the difference between lamb and mutton with the butcher and selecting the freshest bit of sole at the fishmonger's. She usually just bought all her food at Sainsbury's but this was a special occasion and she wanted to reproduce the traditional housewife's morning progress from shop to shop. She wondered if Catherine had done her own shopping and supposed not. Catherine must have had several servants from the earliest years of her marriage; Dickens had published his first novel,
The Pickwick Papers
, to much acclaim and steady sales during the year of their engagement. Still, she was clearly a careful housekeeper; her book might include menus for grand dinner parties and explain how to make coffee for thirty people but it also gave instructions for making stock from a neck of mutton and began with family menus for two or three persons that offered giblet soup, pork cutlets and rice pudding for supper. The book suggested she was both a generous hostess and a frugal housewife, a woman accustomed to
plenty but not wasteful of it. There was something both cozy and responsible about her suggested meals; the menus spoke of her easy confidence in her situation, her unshakeable faith in being a wife.

Shay had always assumed she would be a wife, feeding a family and keeping house, no matter what profession she pursued. It was surely just a matter of time before the right candidate came along. People got married; that's what people did. So when, still single, she first began graduate school, she also assumed that her inspiring supervisor, blessed in every aspect of life, must be happily married too. She imagined him living in a nice house with his charming wife and adorable babies; she thought he would give any promising student the same attention, the same smile he gave her, all the while secretly hoping that somehow this was different. And then there was the day of the hand, its pressure firm, the gesture unmistakable. Another day there were a few elliptical remarks about happiness; then there was a kiss.

And then there was the affair. Six months of ecstasy and heartbreak in equal measures: the furtive daytime encounters at her apartment; quick, short emails cramped by their consciousness that he, her supervisor, was compromising his position and, when they abandoned caution, long, emotional emails flowing from desperation and honesty. Or at least a seeming honesty. A truth of the heart. She knew he wasn't happy at home. Why else would he be lying in her arms at three o'clock on a winter afternoon?

He told her stories of his childhood and youth but said nothing of his wife. His family had escaped Tehran just after the revolution. He was barely a teenager when they had arrived in Montreal with suitcases full of carpets so that his father could set up a branch of his grandfather's business. But his father was really a poet and a scholar; he spoke Farsi, Arabic, French and English. They should have been ideal Canadian immigrants—they had the money; they had the languages—but the man himself was cramped and unhappy in business and seemed to wither in the cold climate, mumbling away in an increasingly heavy accent in whatever language he was speaking. Meanwhile, Al's mother, once a docile Iranian housewife who made meatballs and watered the plants, became hard, pushy, as determined to never miss a language class as she was frantic they would not be cheated in this new place. She was falsely nostalgic too, plastering the fridge with newspaper clippings about the Pahlavi family, sighing over the Shah's death and their sad exile, as though she had completely forgotten the repression and the pocket-lining of the old regime that her husband had so bemoaned. There were arguments: bitter words between a father and a mother who had once been the benign rulers of a childhood paradise. There was pain here, and it moved Shay to tears.

Al and his sister knew their role was to fix things. His sister did an excellent job of it. She married a Syrian-Canadian whose mother went to the same Orthodox church as theirs; she and her new husband took over the
rug business on Crescent Street. She had babies. But Al, well, Al had problems doing what was needed, what was required. Yes, it was a sad story, but frighteningly, titillatingly, that was rather the point. Al had many lovers before her who had heard this tale; he had been feverishly sexually active as a student even as the girls all worried about birth control and the transmission of
AIDS
. And then, married, he had been chronically unfaithful to his wife. Somehow, lovers plugged the hole, compensated for the loss. But Shay was the one, the special one, she would save him. He had told her his Persian name. Arsalan, the lion. It had been shortened to Sal in a Montreal schoolyard. And then just Al. That worked well in Toronto. But to her, he could become Arsalan once more.

And so he left, and for a few glorious months it seemed true. Shay felt she had won, had graduated to a real life. He quickly found a small apartment. She quietly found a new supervisor. Occasionally, they would eat together in restaurants or walk in a street holding hands.

And yet part of him always seemed absent, preoccupied, and then one day he simply announced this had to stop. He needed to go home. He gave no explanation and when she begged said only, “Please, don't.”

She wept for three months, all but vomited from anxiety every time she ran into him in the hallways of the department, and finally bought a plane ticket for London to get some research done. Finding Ellen Ternan in the library, however, was an all but impossible task: to
preserve his secrets, Dickens had burnt all of his correspondence soon after he separated from Catherine and had asked friends to do the same with his letters to them. Then Shay had discovered Catherine's menu book. Catherine was not secret nor invisible and here was her hand. Rabbit pie. Cock-a-leekie. Eve's pudding.

Her new supervisor, Vivian the Virginia Woolf scholar, had not been particularly pleased at the proposed change of topic when Shay had first got up the nerve to email her an outline of her idea back in January. They had emailed to and fro for a bit and finally Vivian had said she would try to find a culinary historian to co-supervise. It was March now, and Shay had yet to hear back.

Vivian seemed cool, cynical and unimpressed, whether by her specifically or by the world in general, Shay wasn't quite sure. She missed Al's enthusiastic encouragement, his passion. She wanted to know what Al would think of her new topic. She was sure he would be more interested than Vivian. She had ached to send just one small email, but they had promised each other when she left for London that would be the end of communication. And she had broken that promise at least twice the previous fall, not to mention sending him a Christmas message. So, she sat tight and didn't tell him what Vivian had said, even though she had been shaken by her new supervisor's first response to her idea: “I gather you would rather
study for the role of wife than that of mistress,” she had written. The “for” must have been a typo, Shay told herself. Vivian had just meant you'd rather study the role of the wife than that of the mistress. She and Al had kept the relationship very quiet. Even when Al had left home and found his own place, she had held on to her apartment. Nobody in the department knew they were together, and Vivian spent all her time over in Women's Studies anyway. Al had arranged things with the chair of the department and to explain the need for the change to Vivian, Shay had simply said at their first meeting that she and Professor Soleymani could not entirely agree on the direction of her research. She suspected Vivian thought he'd harassed her and she dearly wanted to defend him, but Al had only laughed and discouraged her from discussing it with Vivian at all.

“Stick to the research, kiddo,” had been his advice. So, for now she was sticking with Vivian, waiting for a culinary historian and occasionally dropping into the library to see what she could find of Catherine's letters. And she was planning a dinner party.

Sole with lobster sauce. Saddle of lamb with potatoes, mashed and browned. Asparagus. Charlotte russe. Toasted cheese. Shay ran down her shopping list: she needed to find a can of lobster bisque somewhere and Sainsbury's had not obliged. She dropped her groceries at the flat and set out again in the opposite direction, happily determined she would get what she needed to
make her dinner a success. As she walked briskly along, she began talking to Al in her head, explaining Catherine's menu. New Zealand lamb because it tasted the most like mutton, a savoury course after the dessert and, yes, she had mastered the trick of unmoulding a charlotte russe.

The best thing about life in Mornington Crescent could not be mentioned.

Like many acting families, the Ternans were a nomadic tribe and Nelly had lived her first eighteen years in a succession of rented rooms above High Street shops, boarding houses in lesser neighbourhoods and the cheaper station hotels. Washing was performed in a basin in the room with hot water provided by the landlady or her overworked maid, who placed a jug outside a tenant's door in the morning. In the evening, the day's ration of water had long since cooled. A bath was a weekly event Nelly shared with her mother and sisters, with the water heated on the kitchen fires and hauled upstairs, lukewarm by the time she got her turn. The other facilities were outdoors at the back of the garden and often shared by several houses. As a girl, Nelly could not make up her mind which was worse, to line up with strangers to use the cold and
stinking privy or to relieve herself in the warmth and privacy of their room but endure leers and taunts when she went out to empty the chamber pot. Bold Maria could sometimes be convinced to do it for her in exchange for her weekly ration of sweets.

At least at Park Cottage, they only had to share the privy with one neighbour, but the space between it and the house, which could hardly be dignified with the word
garden
, was a short one, and often the cess pit made its presence known, leaving Mrs. Ternan and the neighbour arguing over whose turn it was to pay the shilling required to get a man around to empty it.

In the better houses in those years, there was an upstairs water closet or at least a pipe into which maids might empty the contents of their masters' commodes and chamber pots and sluice them down with water from a jug. Most of these facilities were connected to a cess pit outdoors or even under the house, and smells wafted back up the plumbing. The most geographically privileged were now hooked up to the new London sewers that had been built after the Great Stink of 1858: that burning-hot summer was marked in Nelly's memory by the pain, confusion and excitement of Charles's letter to the press but the rest of the world remembered only the smell of the Thames awash in sewage.

Just around the corner from the elegant terraces of Mornington Crescent proper, the house in Ampthill Square was recently built and boasted the latest improvements,
including a water closet where the occupant could use a built-in commode and then pull a lever to open a sluice himself. If the closet emitted unpleasant smells, it paled in comparison to the privies of Nelly's youth, and she could always open a little air vent that had been strategically cut into the outer wall. In her new home, Nelly rejoiced in a warm and private toilet.

It was located in a small alcove on the second floor, up a few short steps off the main staircase and across from the largest bedroom in the house. This was her room—it was the first time in her life she had not shared with her sisters—and there was also, right next door to it, a large bathroom fitted with a metal tub and permanent washstand. She did share the bathroom with her mother and sisters whenever they were in residence, but she was, from the start, acknowledged in her family as the lady of the house and for her alone the maid could be required to haul the hot water upstairs and fill the metal tub every day of the week if she so chose. Her mother and sisters would still make do with a Monday bath night but Nelly might now luxuriate daily. She often took a warm bath on a cold, lonely evening, or would enjoy a long, perfumed soak in the morning if she knew Charles was coming to visit that afternoon.

Growing up in the theatre, she was not ignorant in the ways of the world and, in theory, was aware there might be a high price to pay for her new relations with Charles. In the two years before he had purchased the house for her,
he had often visited her with her family at Park Cottage, escorted her home from the theatres where she worked, walked with her on the heath, dined with her in restaurants and waged a quiet but relentless campaign to do these things with her alone. Mrs. Ternan's defences were increasingly overwhelmed and when he offered to pay for Fanny's Italian music lessons, her mother went abroad with an eldest daughter whose virtue was perhaps more easily protected and at less steep a price than her youngest's was proving to be. Nelly and Maria, now both working at a theatre where Mr. Dickens knew the manager, looked after each other in new lodgings he had helpfully found for them near Oxford Street, but Maria could hardly be expected to chaperone her younger sister all the time nor protect her from their great benefactor. In those months, Charles's attentions became increasingly ardent, although Nelly still permitted him only the occasional kiss. It was not until the day they toured the newly purchased house that he first took Nelly in his arms. And it was in the large second-floor bedroom, one afternoon when her mother and Maria were out shopping, that she gave herself to him.

Once established as a possibility, Charles panted for these encounters; on an afternoon when her relations had tactfully removed themselves, he would arrive at the house in a state of agitation and, barely into the drawing room, he would begin by taking her hand, then swing her arm to and fro with a boyish guile and soon tug her toward the stairs and so up to the bedroom. Afterwards
he was calm and expansive, full of confident plans for the future. Nelly, on the other hand, felt mainly confused; she did not dislike his embraces but nor did she long for them. Parts of the process were pleasant enough; other aspects were occasionally painful. Mainly, she found their relations messy, especially in the aftermath.

It was another woman at the theatre, a character actress named Jeanie now well into her thirties, who, when Nelly quietly mentioned her forthcoming retirement from the stage at the tender age of twenty, had advised her how she might best take precautions.

“Oh, you're off with your Mr. Dickens, are you?” Jeanie had asked when Nelly let slip that their current engagement would be her last. Surprised at the name, Nelly looked at her with what she was a good-enough actress to know was an air of blank incomprehension. The progression of her friendship with Mr. Dickens was her secret, the protective cloak in which she could wrap herself if another actor upstaged her with an improvised bit of business or a gentleman the worse for drink whistled at her from the boxes. Sometimes at home, if her mother and sisters were out, she would gaze at herself in the one looking glass, hug herself tight and think, “He loves me, only me. He can't do without me.” If he was beloved of the world, she was beloved of him and she clung to that as a delicious, invisible secret. She rarely discussed the nature of their friendship with her family and never mentioned his name to anyone else. Jeanie,
who might certainly have noticed Mr. Dickens in a box or at the stage door, made their friendship sound unremarkable and very real. The idea was new to Nelly, dangerous, worrying but exciting too.

“You needn't look like that,” Jeanie said. “I can't say I blame you going off with him. You'll be living the life. You'll be having his babies before you know it.”

At this, Nelly recoiled. The prospect of bearing children was a vague and distant possibility that she in no way associated with Charles.

“I certainly hope not,” she said, now replacing blank incomprehension with injured pride.

“No offence meant, love, but if you give him what he wants, and it's all men want, well, babies follow.”

Nelly simply stared at her, and Jeanie misinterpreted her silence.

“Did your mother not tell you that?”

“Oh, yes, I know that…”

“You'll need to take precautions if you don't want babies.”

“Precautions? Are there precautions…” Nelly ventured.

“Oh yes, there are precautions. How do you think Sam and I managed it after Mary was born? We couldn't possibly have toured with two children. I suppose your mother did it with three, right enough. Your mother is a powerful woman, Nelly. Stronger than many of us. I could not have led the life she has.”

So, Jeanie explained to Nelly what was required. She was to go to a certain apothecary's shop, wait until the female assistant was ready to serve her and express concern about hygiene. She might even discreetly mention there was a smell she disliked. She would be provided with a special bag and a special powder.

“It's quite easy,” Jeanie assured her. “You just flush it all out of you every time.”

And so, the large bathroom in Mornington Crescent was also the place that Nelly carefully syringed and washed herself after every visit from Charles.

Over the months, they gradually established a pattern; now that they had the house, he was increasingly cautious about being seen alone with her in public, inviting Mrs. Ternan to join them to eat at Verrey's or attend a play at Covent Garden, but he spent long afternoons and evenings alone with her in Mornington Crescent several days a week. While Mrs. Ternan joined Maria as she toured the provinces or returned to visit Fanny on her second sojourn in Italy, Charles and Nelly had the house to themselves. They would read to each other; she would play the piano and sing for him; he would bring instalments of his latest novel for her to read before publication. In those years, he was producing
Great Expectations
and she took a certain pride not only in discussing the development of his characters and catching every typographical error in the page proofs but also in having inspired the idea of a grand
and hopeless passion in the first place. Not that Charles's passion was hopeless any longer. Inevitably, after reading and editing, they would make their way upstairs.

She came to enjoy their relations more, to find something if not ecstatic at least comforting in their union. She settled into this new existence, savouring its luxuries while still always vaguely assuming that marriage and motherhood were distant things that would happen to her one day with some other man after this phase of her youth was past. If she privately wished Catherine Dickens dead and buried, so that she might marry Charles, she certainly never told him; it was too faint and ill conceived a thought to even articulate completely to herself. She saw herself as so entirely different from that lady who had knocked over the umbrella stand in her mother's vestibule, she could hardly imagine taking her place. And so, she never mentioned his wife's name to him, and their secret life together seemed happy enough, until the day Nelly had to admit to herself, as she sat in her warm and comfortable closet staring at her spotless white undergarment, that her monthly visitor was now three weeks late.