In Search of Mary (6 page)

This is still the scene today. Apart from it’s chucking it down, the rain is now so hard it’s bouncing back up. We walk round and round the top of the hill. After a bit of squawking, Will falls asleep inside his bubble as we huddle under our umbrellas. We stand lost in conversation as the water splashes around us, and Ursula sets Wollstonecraft’s political observations in a Norwegian setting. Far below, a large ferry comes in, leaving a trail on the grey sea.

I mention that the words Wollstonecraft uses most often about Norway are “independent”, “sprightly” and “industrious”. “We do like hard work,” says Ursula. “It matters to us.” She talks about equality and financial independence, proud of her enlightened country. She tells me that couples always split a restaurant bill. This would have meant everything to Wollstonecraft:

“And she’s right,” says Ursula. “It’s good to be financially independent. And generally, when you are married, it’s quite usual that a couple will have one bank account for all the household bills and everything, but you would also have your own private bank account. My husband was exceptionally kind about things like that—”

Ursula looks away towards the sea. We are close together under the umbrellas, but I lean towards her. She is crying.

“I lost him a year ago yesterday.”

I ask what his name was. He was called Per. She waves away my proffered tissue, pulling out her own handkerchief. We manage to laugh about his very typical Norwegian name. She blows her nose, exclaims “So so!”, and we carry on talking about Wollstonecraft and independence.

Eventually we head back down the hill to shelter from the rain in a café, with black coffees and cake. We carry on through town, taking in the grander houses. Here’s where Wollstone-craft mingled with the Mayor and other people of influence, gathering public support in her hunt for the last-known person to see Imlay’s missing silver: Captain Peder Ellefsen.

We walk through puddles back to the hostel, where the owner, who knows Ursula, brings over a tray with tea and thin slices of cheese on rye bread.

“Nice walk in the rain?”

“Ja,” says Ursula. “We covered some important ground.”

She smiles at me, I smile back, my mouth full of Jarlsberg. I hear a strangled cry and leap up just in time to wrest the hostel owner’s cat’s tail from the hands of my beaming son.

Later in the afternoon the rain stops, its absence suddenly audible. I seize the moment to go back up onto Wollstonecraft’s favourite hill. I pop Will into his chaise longue on wheels, and we barrel back up the steep slopes through the dripping grass. The birds are singing all around, also relieved by a break from the rain. I have to sit here for a while, in Wollstonecraft’s secret resting place. This is a privilege. There’s no one else around. The darkest clouds have lifted, but it’s still misty. I perch on a
large stone, gently bring out my copy of
Letters from Norway
and read some passages aloud.

This dreamy interlude wandering into a defence of her implacable manner is a direct plea to her lover, the unnamed “dear friend”. He’s there, always. It’s impossible to forget that she’s trying to win Imlay back. Wollstonecraft loved just as she lived: passionately, and at a hundred miles an hour – as if it was the last day of her life. If she’d had the technology, she’d easily have sent a dozen reproachful text messages a minute. In capitals.

I want to be Wollstonecraft’s companion, but I feel incapable of her depths and her restless energy. Her bleak shuddering sighs are echoed only by my contented ones. Above all, there’s the inescapable fact that she tried (more than once) to kill herself. While I can’t quite shake it off, I’m afraid to approach the theme. Her many detractors have used Wollstonecraft’s attempted suicides as proof of bad character, or wheeled out the creaky old “undermining her legacy” attack, so naturally I’m compelled to defend her. But how? I’ve tried to ignore them, to
gloss over them. But here, in the misty air, I can almost sense her sadness – the neediness between the lines – clutching on to me as I read.

Guiltily I lift myself out of her words for a breather, trying to imagine how her smashed-in hopes took her to that brink. It fails: I fail to sink into her sadness. “Thinking of death makes us tenderly cling to our affections – with more than usual tenderness,” she writes, later adding: “It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist … Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream.”

She loved her child, and made “precautions” for her care. But she still did it. She tried to die. I look at Will. He’s humming to himself. She didn’t love her little Frances any less than this. I sit for more long minutes on that stone, in a deep vague sadness, getting a damp bum while Will grabs out for the long grasses waving nearby. I look around again. Above all, above the sea and the town, it’s so peaceful. There’s a sense of healthiness here: it feels wholesome and sane. It could be the cleanliness, or the proximity of the sea, but I can see why it was here that Wollstonecraft began to recover. Eventually I sigh out a long breath, and inside my head I tell her something:

You haven’t ceased to exist.

Chapter Four

“Sympathy in a Strange Land”

When we get back to the hostel, Will invents a new game. He crawls at high speed out of our room and away down a long corridor. I wait, then chase after him, scoop him up and bring him, laughing, back in my arms. Off he crawls again, his hands make a splat-splat noise on the floor, a light clapping, as he trundles like a determined beetle. We do this until he gets tired, and I start to think about packing up the monster rucksack.

Moving on we have yet to meet Gunnar, the tireless Wollstonecraft detective. Mick, the heartbroken captain in a stripy sailor’s top. Knut, the only communist mayor in Norway, who is proud that Wollstonecraft came to his town, despite the fact that she detested it. I will encounter a taste of what proper fans get when they meet another fan. It’s solidarity with a slight edge: “I love and understand her.” “I love her more. I loved her first!” “Well, I am so intimate that I can criticize her – we’re practically siblings.”

But first, like Wollstonecraft, we must head west. Wollstone-craft left Tønsberg having enlisted the great and the good to her cause. She put together a legal case and was lobbying hard. Urged on by Imlay, her strategy was to impress upon Norwegians that their fellow countryman, Peder Ellefsen,
was a tarnish upon their reputation. She would take it to the highest authorities. But first she must track him down and confront him face to face. “I am forewarned that I shall find them still more cunning and fraudulent as I advance towards the westward”
.
She pursues Ellefsen westward along the crazy shoreline. And we pursue her.

At the bus station in Tønsberg they tell me we’ll have to change buses twice on the way to our next stop, Kragerø. But it’s not as bad as I expect. Luckily the buses are a feature of child-friendly Norway: the drivers leap out to help us on board. They smile and chat. One holds Will while I fold the buggy and then asks his passengers to move, giving us two seats together. I’m still recovering from the contrast to British buses when he even installs a baby seat, so Will can sleep all the way.

It’s another moment of triumph. I’ve found that, on balance, travelling with Will is proving to make life easier rather than harder. He gives me the biggest smile when we’re in the queue at the bus station, and I’m instantly happier than anyone else in the whole place. I realize that at home I’m always trying to squeeze my life around him. It’s like a see-saw, either doing baby things or grown-up things, but never both.

But this is different. Here we are on the same side, in it together. I tell him everything that’s happening, and he smiles back. Even if it’s about how I’m dying for the loo and should’ve gone before we left, he beams at me. I reach into his baby seat, stroke his see-through blonde hair and gently twirl the curls around his ears.

Travelling with a baby is especially handy for anyone of a curious bent. It gives you improved access, a licence to talk
to anyone you like. People catch your eye and smile. (Some people do hate kids, but they probably also hate humanity and are therefore no loss.) Will’s presence elicits acts of kindness I’d surely have otherwise missed. Maybe I look more vulnerable. Wollstonecraft remarks on the Norwegians’ curiosity towards her:

A young couple on the bus waves at Will and strikes up conversation with me. They’ve dropped down from the clouds in Sweden, and are travelling to Kragerø to look for work. They tell me many young Swedes are coming to Norway now, because unemployment is higher there, and wages are higher here. They offer Will some radioactive-looking sweets, and he munches them while I try to look mellow and un-disapproving.

There are wild lupins everywhere, alongside the railways, roads and motorways. Bushes of towering purple spires, giving a crazy Moominland vibe. Another person on the bus tells me it has now been made an offence to plant lupins in your garden, because they all escaped and are taking over the entire country. This can’t be true, but I love it anyway. Heading towards Kragerø, the landscape through the bus windows changes dramatically. It gets wilder, steeper soaring rocks. Road signs
feature pictures of a moose. Our road hugs the coastline, so nothing is in a straight line, as the water comes in and out of the land. It dominates our route, sending us over and around.

I pull out my huge map of Norway, folded specially to the right place. This is not a country that fits easily onto a map, being quite a silly shape, like Chile. Norway is like a large hairy blanket draped over the top of Europe. Looking closer, you see that the country is almost all coast: endless islands, zigzag coastlines and fjords inside fjords. There is water everywhere. I recall reading that eighty per cent of Norwegians live within ten kilometres of salt water. It is their element. Rocks burst through all around us, small islands, soaring rocky cliffs, or the tell-tale white foam showing that they’re just below the water’s surface.

I rest my forehead against the windowpane, and another blaze of purple lupins zooms by. I’m not entirely sure what the next part of our journey will entail. It’s all up in the air. But of one thing I’m certain: of all the pieces of good fortune I’ve had so far on this trip – a gleefully large number when I think about it – the best must have been making contact with Gunnar Molden.

Gunnar is a Norwegian historian, museum curator and Wollstonecraft enthusiast. His research into the treacherous tale of Wollstonecraft and the missing silver spans decades and countries. Among his discoveries is a letter written by Wollstonecraft herself, buried for years in some maritime archives in Denmark. His detective work informs the thrilling ‘Silver Ship’ chapter of the Lyndall Gordon biography that I’ve been devouring.

I first contacted him by email, expressing my interest in Wollstonecraft’s voyage. He replied politely, including his phone number in case I had any questions. Are you kidding? Of course I did – I called him right away. He was quiet and shy, and full of Wollstonecraft knowledge. On and off, through the many swerves and obstacles of getting the trip organized, he has regularly helped out and given contacts and ideas. He is the fairy godfather of my trip. And I’ve never actually met him.

Now we’re on a bus to Kragerø where Gunnar has asked his cousin Ingvild and her husband Per to put us up in their summer house. The plan is to stay there for a night and then set off on the boat trip the following morning. The boat trip. The Boat Trip. This is the maximum, the ultimate, the most Wollstonecrafty part of my journey. We plan to travel by boat just the way Wollstonecraft did, right up to her final and most westerly destination: Risør. Just as it is in her letters.

I’m struggling to believe the boat-trip part: it’s a bit too good to be true. Gunnar says he’s sorted it out. I told him, way back, that I couldn’t afford to pay him as a consultant, and he dismissed the idea: “Leave it to me. And I can find us a boat.” Wollstonecraft met similar generosity:

A little coffee these days will set you back around £5. In a country where you have to double-check your finances before
you order a drink, how I’ve managed to access a whole boat is still a mystery to me.

Who, among the people at the bus station in Kragerø, is cousin Ingvild? I have no idea what she looks like, but fortunately we are fairly easy to spot. No one else is tottering under a rucksack like a misshapen tortoise whilst pushing a beaming baby in a large buggy. Ingvild comes up and gives me a hug. We chat as we walk over a bridge and up the extremely steep hill to her house. Good god! This whole country is on a slope of about one in three. I try not to pant as I speak.