Or What You Will Read online

  Tish nods. She doesn’t understand. Her skin has goosebumps. Giulia hands her a cream silk shirt, and a jacket that looks like something Raphael or Titian would have drawn a young man wearing, maroon velvet with immense sleeves. Tish puts them on gratefully and feels immensely warmer.

  “Your boots will dry if we stuff them with rags,” Giulia says. “Nice piece of work they are, and they fit you well enough.” Tish has big hands and feet, but it isn’t the torment to her it would be in a time of mass manufacture. Tish’s boots are handmade not because she is hard to fit but because almost all shoes are handmade, factory shoe production is only just beginning. She would prefer to have small feet, as she would prefer all of herself to be smaller, but it does not limit her choice of footwear as it would for women in decades closer to our own. Giulia hands Tish a pair of dark green tights with leather soles on the bottom of the feet, like built-in slippers. “Pull these on while I see to your boots.”

  Tish gets the tights backwards the first time, and has to start again. When she’s done, Giulia has finished stuffing the boots with rags. She seats Tish on a three-legged stool and efficiently brushes her hair, then ties it back behind her head with a ribbon.

  “There, that’ll do,” she says, tilting her head on one side and looking Tish over critically. Tish is used to maids, to being waited on, but Giulia doesn’t behave like the maids she’s used to. She’s assuming a greater equality, and Tish, off balance, has given it to her.

  “Do you think you could find me a skirt?” Tish asks, apologetically, as she would never have addressed any servant in her own century.

  “You’ll do as you are,” Giulia says, reassuringly.

  Tish looks down at her legs, which seem practically naked. The jacket reaches only to her upper thighs. “No, a skirt,” she says. “To cover my legs.” When Giulia still doesn’t seem to understand, she gestures. “Like you’re wearing. And the alarming lady.”

  Giulia laughs. “Miranda, that is, she’s not a lady any more, she gave it up to be a wizard.”

  Tish frowns, puzzled. “But she’s wearing a skirt.”

  “She is, but you don’t need to. You’re tall enough, and slim enough, and your hair’s the right length. Nobody’ll question it. Honestly. Don’t worry.” Giulia is looking as perplexed as Tish feels. “Doublet and hose you’re wearing.”

  “You mean I should try to pass as a man?” Tish asks.

  “That’s right. Don’t you know anything?”

  “Evidently not,” Tish says. She has had a very confusing afternoon and has been thrust into a world she knows nothing about, for which her education has not prepared her.

  “Passing as a man is the very first thing you should do, if you possibly can,” Giulia says.

  In Shakespeare, girls disguise themselves as men at the drop of a hat. The other way around, not so much. There are two ways to go from a world that divides everything by gender roles. One is to open things up and make everything available to everyone, which is the direction our world has at least been trying to move in. The other is to keep the rigid roles but allow people to cross the line if they feel stuck where their bodies would allot them. In Twelfth Night Viola wore her brother’s clothes both to be safe alone and unprotected and to be able to get a job. Employment opportunities for men and women were very different. Historically, women have always done more than people expect from their memories of dumbed-down school history. But often a woman has to be an exception to fill certain roles, has to be unusual, and the traditional female sphere is traditionally circumscribed. Illyria, made by Sylvia in the seventies from Shakespeare’s imagination of an Italy he had never seen, has adopted this device of cross-dressing to take on male economic and social roles to such an extent that Tish’s reluctance to give up the outward markers of her gender seems quite incomprehensible to Giulia. It’s not how Sylvia would make up the world now. But she started it off like that, and it’s had a long time to elaborate itself.

  “You’re not dressed as a man,” Tish points out.

  “Everybody knows me here. If I want to do it, I’ll have to go off somewhere where I’m a stranger. I’m thinking about it, don’t get me wrong. But the trouble is, nobody will know me and I won’t know anyone. I’ll be out of the web, with nobody to look out for me. I’ll have to start fresh. And there are all kinds of dangers in the world. I could be killed by bandits or forced to join an army and then killed in battle. But I’m learning Greek and astrology and magic with Master Ficino, which will help when the time comes.”

  Tish laughs, and begins to enjoy herself. “Yes, that should help,” she says. “But if you can learn all those things as a girl, why do you have to dress as a man?”

  Giulia doesn’t seem to mind being laughed at. She extends a hand to help Tish up off the low stool. “To be free.”

  Something else Giulia said resonates with Tish. “Am I out of the web?”

  “You are, but you would be anyway, being in a strange place. But you’re inside the walls of Thalia, where there aren’t any bandits or tyrant armies, so you should be safe enough. But trust me, it’s a lot easier to be in a strange place as a man.”

  “But I like being a girl!”

  Now it’s Giulia’s turn to laugh. “You can change back any time, say if you want to get married and settle down. But you’ll find there’s a lot more scope and freedom for men.”

  “How old are you?” Tish asks, looking at her reflection in the cloudy mirror that hangs on the wall. She likes the way she looks, she decides, and smiles at her reflected self.

  “You do ask personal questions!” Giulia says, sounding shocked.

  “Is that a very personal question?” Tish asks, turning to her apologetically. “I’m sorry. Where I come from it wouldn’t seem too intrusive.”

  “How old are you, then?” Giulia asks, taking up the lamp again.

  “I’m nineteen,” Tish says, guileless.

  “Well, you do come straight out with it! I’m nineteen too, if you really want to know. But you should never ask. What you should say, about your age, if it ever comes up, which it probably won’t among properly brought-up people, is that you’re giovane, a youth. That’s all anyone needs to know. Being giovane means you’re between about thirteen and about thirty-five, old enough to be apprenticed, old enough to be earning and away from home, not old enough yet to settle down. Of course, some people stay giovane for decades. Centuries, even. It’s a great stage of life. You can be apprenticed, you can learn, you can disguise yourself as a man and go on adventures, you can go to one of the universities, and you’re not tied down at all yet.”

  “Centuries?” Tish echoes. Giulia is so clearly serious that Tish isn’t questioning her so much as confirming that she heard right.

  “Not in the same place, obviously,” Giulia says, answering what she thinks Tish asked. She hands her a piece of dark green cloth. “Their family would be sure to be nagging them to settle down by then! But if you move about, and if you have youth spells, it could be centuries, easily. Though some people, of course, can’t wait to be grown up and have children and houses and responsibility and all that. They race through their giovane years as fast as they can. One of my grandmothers was like that. I don’t know her age, but I’m not her oldest grandchild and I can tell you she hasn’t celebrated her century yet.”

  One of Tish’s grandmothers lived to be eighty-two. The other died in her fifties. One grandfather died at Waterloo, and the other three years ago at sixty-five. Her mother died at twenty-five, giving birth to Larry.

  “Centuries,” she says, again, turning the green cloth in her hands. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a hat, a chaperon, like the one your boyfriend was wearing.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Tish says, feeling herself blush.

  Giulia twists the cloth deftly into a hat like Dolly’s and sets it on Tish’s head. “If he’s not your boyfriend, he’ll do for me,” she says, grinning. “Lovely face he has! What do you want to stay a girl
for, if he’s not even your boyfriend? I thought that had to be it. Come on, let’s go down, I want to hear the answers to all your questions. Be careful on the steps, they’re a bit wet, and the soles on those hose don’t have much grip.”

  Tish, tugging a little at the hem of her doublet, follows Giulia carefully down the stairs and through the courtyard, and, turning the opposite way from the entrance hall, into a neat ground-floor sitting room where Ficino, Miranda, and Dolly are waiting, with cake and wine.

  11

  IN PRINCIPIO ERAT VERBUM

  There, did you see Giulia come out of nowhere, out of the mist? She wasn’t a placeholder, like Tish and Dolly, a dummy moving mechanically until animated. She was nothing, a need for a servant, which Ficino doesn’t have, so she had to be an apprentice. She was no more than a requirement for somebody to help poor wet Tish out of her ruined crinoline, and to tell her to disguise herself as a boy, and give her a bit of information about the world. The whole of Giulia’s very solid self, all of her ambitions and aspirations, came together out of the mist as her words and actions were written. She wasn’t anywhere or anything, and then once she started to speak, there she was on the page, herself, with strong opinions, and five years already studying Greek and magic with Ficino. In intention, she was a job, a role, a menial who would disappear back at the end of the scene with an armload of Tish’s damp and discarded garments. She existed simply because no Victorian young lady could undress without help. (I don’t mean that psychologically but as a real physical fact. Nobody could take off the clothes Tish was wearing alone. They were designed to make it impossible.) Now Giulia’s a character, as real as any of us, with something to do in the story that is forming, and the garments are left drooping and dripping, abandoned all over the floor. The cage of the crinoline stands forlornly near the Cupid and Psyche chest, with the wet pink flounces draped bedraggled over it. The ruins of the straw bonnet have been kicked into a corner. The boots are standing drying. (With rags, not the newspaper with which Sylvia would instinctively dry boots. Paper exists, but is more expensive than cloth here, and damp cloth can be reused.) But Giulia has gone ahead, bearing aloft the magic lamp, off down the road towards adventure, with Tish, in man’s attire, following close on her heels.

  We all have our origin stories, how we were bitten by a radioactive spider, how we escaped from the caves of trolls, how we were licked out of the ice by a giant cow … or maybe we were part of the rock until one day a chisel fell, and was clutched by something that had neither shape nor will before, and yet we carved ourselves free, one finger at a time, creating and shaping as much as freeing ourselves, until we stood clear of the rock, distinct for the first time, laughing as we took that first step away. Or maybe it wasn’t rock but a cloud that we carved away, to make a form of air that could soar on the currents of wind, leaning into them, swifter than any bird and as graceful. That one feels closest to my own story. I have had many origin stories, as I have had many stories. But when I think of my own true beginning, it feels much more like seizing the magic chisel in a hand that was a moment before no more than a protuberance in a rock than anything else I can think of.

  For Sylvia, of course, it was escape from the witch’s house. Her mother would be, mythologically, a stepmother, and perhaps it is better that way. That way there could have once been a true mother, a loving mother, who was withdrawn, removed, snatched away by death, and replaced by the fiend who hates her. Perhaps her mother did love her, once, nurtured her, grew her in her very body, fed her milk from her own breasts—ugh, Sylvia objects.

  “What? You breast fed the girls. You liked it.”

  “Yes, but to think of my mother doing it to me turns my stomach. What are you doing with this? Where are you going? There wasn’t any stepmother. There certainly wasn’t any loving true mother. There was just my own awful mother, who never loved me.”

  “Is it more painful to think that she did, once?”

  “It isn’t a case of whether or not it’s painful. It isn’t true. As far back as I can remember, she hated me. She liked the other children, but never me. I was always the scapegoat.”

  But I can remember moments in early childhood when her mother was still the source of love, given or withheld as she chose, times when little Sylvia still wanted to please her and had not yet realised the hopeless and arbitrary nature of that quest. Did she toddle off into the snow to search for strawberries, and find them, only to be told on her triumphant return that strawberries were tasteless in winter and a waste of money? Did she not make a potholder from her own sweat and blood, to have it rejected as a sweaty and bloody disgrace? Did she not find that mythical item that graced every shopping list for years, the postcard-sized photo frame, only to be told that her offering did not fulfil some other arbitrary requirement?

  “I’d long since given up hope by then,” she objects. “That was the year I went to college, for goodness’ sake.”

  “So you’d been questing for the postcard-sized photo frame for years already by that point. And when you found it, didn’t you feel—”

  “Maybe for a moment,” she says, and as she says it she is not her trim and self-assured self but again that gawky girl with long black hair twisted up messily on the top of her head and her absurd orange winter coat with the big pocket flaps. It is the 1960s and she is in Ogilvy’s department store in downtown Montreal with snow dripping off her boots (not yet her two-buttoned Hong Kong boots, but long beige boots with fur-trimmed tops) snatching up the photo frame with a shriek of delight.

  “You’d think I’d learn,” she says, but of course she did learn. It took Idris years to teach her that you do not have to love like a kitten pouncing on a string that might be snatched away at any moment. Nothing she could do would ever please her mother, and then Steve was worse. But Idris liked her, was pleased by her and proud of her, and at last she learned how to break her bad patterns and relax into that.

  One of the things that ran through her marriage with Idris like a gold thread in a brocade was their cultural differences. They drew them to each other, and at the same time pushed them away, and sometimes the most trivial things turned out to be the most important. Yet always she was drawn to the difference, loving him for being different when the difference showed, even when he had become utterly familiar. She loved Idris for his own self, but the details of his different culture made him easier for her to love, long before loving him became a reflex.

  We were talking about origins. What makes a person a xenophobe or a xenophile? It’s not simple. Let us consider a little girl taken to the house of her grandmother and there being told to take cookies or little cakes off the rack where they have been cooling, and put them onto a doily on a plate. What the child knows is that her own mother despises doilies, and will fulminate against their pointlessness and ugliness. Will she say anything of this to her grandmother, her father’s mother? Or will she keep it to herself, looking sideways at her grandmother and at the doily, then climb up to stand on the wooden chair by the scrubbed table and carefully spread the doily out on the plate as instructed and put the little cakes onto it one by one, arranging them neatly?

  Will she realise suddenly as she is doing it that if her grandmother does this, uses a doily, then her father must have grown up with it, and yet he has never said anything when her mother speaks scornfully of the practice, never argued or defended his own mother’s custom. She has seen him sitting silent, and never suspected he might not agree. She does not know what he thinks of doilies, anymore than her grandmother knows what she thinks. She has only recently learned the great and necessary art of keeping things to herself. But as she leans forward, setting the cakes around the rim in a precise circle, she realises that she does not know what she herself thinks of the pierced patterned paper that keeps them from the plate. She has no objective standard of beauty or utility, not yet, and as her grandmother comes in to the back kitchen and laughs at her, poised on the chair with a cake in each hand, this is the moment whe
n she must take sides for her mother’s standards and the home, and xenophobia, or for her grandmother’s and the first step towards loving what is different.

  “It wasn’t the doily,” Sylvia says.

  “I wasn’t necessarily talking about you.”

  “Of course you were. You were talking about my grandmother and her doilies. I can see them now, white, and silver, and gold, with the little cut-out holes and symmetrical patterns. I remember getting them out of the packet and separating them slowly so they wouldn’t tear. She loved them. For her they meant sophistication, elegance. She saved the gold ones for special occasions, weddings, christenings, funerals. Do you remember, they were all gold doilies when my grandfather died?”

  “You don’t use them.”

  “No … nobody uses them now. That was the forties you’re talking about, maybe just into the fifties. But I was already a xenophile. I loved the sound of French in the streets, in shops. I liked to go to new places.”

  “I think it was the doily that tipped the balance,” I say. “Such a tiny thing.”

  “An excrescence, my mother used to call them. Ridiculous for her to be so vehement about something trivial that gave my grandmother so much harmless pleasure.”

  We both remember her father’s heavy silence.

  “It was the class thing,” she says. “My mother, whose own parents emigrated from Cork and kept a tavern, aspired to be higher class than my father and his parents, and saw doilies as symbols of their working-class respectability. Mad, really, when you think about it. How can working-class raffishness be better than working-class refinement? To most people, even if they cared about class, which nobody in Canada really does so much today, the difference would be so infinitesimal as to be invisible. Anyway, if it did matter, then the Harrisons were better. They were educated people.”