Serial Monogamy (23 page)

“Beautiful morning,” the gentleman in her compartment nodded amiably before he buried himself in his paper.

She looked out the window, watching a soft mist slowly lift and evaporate to reveal a gentle green landscape, and considered the events of the past night. He was not going to last long; that was clear. And once he was gone, then there would be a great deal of fuss, newspaper reports and eulogies, some grand funeral that she would not be able to attend, she supposed. She wondered if they would invite Mrs. Dickens. Probably not.

And so her mind turned finally now to truly consider Catherine. She saw her once again, the heavy woman trapped in the little vestibule of Park Cottage. In those early days, it had been easier to dismiss her, to view her as a pathetic and foolish figure who probably deserved her fate, not being clever, lively or pretty enough to hold on to the mercurial Charles. It had been easier than considering the alternative, that perhaps he was neither patient nor kind enough to hold on to her. And then, over the years, Nelly had come to feel a certain kinship with this invisible soul; the private Charles was not a comfortable person, dark, restless, regretful, and his closest companions often bore the brunt of that personality. Today, Nelly imagined Catherine's sorrow and her desperation; she felt them almost as her own; they had loved, they had forborne. They had seen a greater need than their own, and they had been erratically rewarded.

She shook herself, almost physically the way a dog does when it comes in from the garden or gets up from a nap, dismissing this fantasy and smiling to herself at the
path her thoughts had taken: She didn't suppose any sympathy she felt for Mrs. Dickens could possibly be mutual.

As the train shuddered its way toward London, she barely noticed the time passing, and when they arrived at Charing Cross less than an hour later, she realized she had completely forgotten that she was always nervous on trains. She smoothed her skirt, a sensible summer linen she had worn to walk about the garden the previous afternoon, and rose from her seat, pausing before the compartment door. She nodded at the stranger across from her, took a deep breath, grasped the handle firmly in her right hand, pushed open the door and alighted onto a platform already bustling with morning commuters. She shook out her skirt as though to brush off the grime and walked unhesitatingly into the crowd. Within a moment, she was lost from sight.

She reappeared about an hour later in Peckham, home in time for a late breakfast as she had promised herself, but when she arrived at her own front door, Jane was standing there, looking grim and holding a telegram in her hand.

“This just arrived, miss. You probably crossed the boy in the street.”

The telegraph had proved faster than the train and the news had beat her home: he must have died before she had even arrived in London. She crumpled Georgina's
telegram in her hand and sat down heavily on the sofa in the parlour, the sofa where he had been sitting only twelve hours before.

“I'm very sorry, miss,” Jane said, guessing at the news. “He was a great man. All England will mourn him deeply.”

Nelly tossed her head at the platitudes and stared down at the floor.

“I suppose it will,” she replied finally, but she was thinking more about how she would mourn him. Very privately, no doubt. She didn't look up at Jane and spoke more to herself than to her servant.

“I'd known him since I was seventeen. All my adult life.”

“He meant the world to you, miss.”

“Yes.”

“You knew him better than anyone.”

“I suppose so.”

“You should write a memoir, miss.”

“Oh, no. I don't think so.” Nelly looked up now, roused from her thoughts and outraged at the suggestion.

“Of course not, miss. I wasn't thinking.”

“No, I am not much of a writer,” she said, more pensively.

“No, miss.”

“And of course, I really didn't know him.”

“No, miss.”

“After all, I was only a very little girl when he met my family. My sisters knew him better; they are older than I am, but I was just a little girl and he was just a family friend.”

“Yes, miss.”

“I was quite small, just a child.” She was staring at Jane now.

“Yes, miss.” Jane sounded puzzled.

“I mean, I'm young yet, not even twenty-one.”

“That's a story, miss.”

“Yes,” Nelly replied, drawing herself up straight and raising her chin, “but it's a good story.”

M
y darling daughters:

Your father did keep this text safely for you. Last year, with your birthdays coming up, he finally read it and then he gave it to me. He wanted my advice, or my permission perhaps. Your mother intended you to read this, she wanted you to know our pasts. And who are we to interfere in her decisions about her relationship with you just because we can? I love you both and have always enjoyed being your stepmother. I know things have not always been easy between us; you girls were so sad and confused when I first arrived in the house. I wanted to spend every day hugging away all the pain in your little faces but I wasn't your mother; I couldn't make it up to you. And later? I guess adolescence is never easy for anyone.

My solution, the only solution I could think of, has been to love you as much as I possibly could through the years, for your father's sake, but also because I felt I owed
that to your mother. She may have had her reasons to resent me, but I never felt any hostility toward her. In truth, there was a period where I just wanted to be her, which may sound silly since I think I only met her once, at a party or something, but I used to long to be her. I guess what I really mean is that I longed to be your father's wife. It was odd reading what she had written; I certainly knew what it felt like to be Shay and then the bits about marriage really struck home. Long marriages are often more complicated than they look from the outside.

Your mother has taught me things about your father that I didn't even know. Somehow it's hard to picture the great Dickens scholar as a little boy playing marbles in the streets of Tehran, isn't it? Even when we went back there last year, he never mentioned the marbles.

I know when you ask him about his childhood and Iran, he always says it was a different life; that he is Canadian now, but sometimes when he talks about a rug or says a few words in Farsi, you can see he is still half Persian.

But, most of all, you have to realize how proud he is of you both. It was a big reason why he wanted to go back to Iran. He just wanted to be able to tell his cousins and his aunts: “This is Goli, some day soon she will be president of the bank; this is Anahita, she fills in for the main newscaster on weekends but soon enough they will see that he has to go so that she can take over the job.” He would never say such things in Canada. I know it
made you both squirm but he loves you to pieces, both of you, even if he doesn't always say it.

Last year, I asked him if he wanted to go back to Iran again this summer and do you know what he said? He said, “Goli and Anahita and Hope are my country.” He stressed each of our three names so emphatically and so equally. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever said to me. It so confirmed for me that I was part of you.

So, now you can read your mother's last story. As she herself told you, it is yours to do with as you wish. You always call me Mum and that means a lot to me but I know if people ask you directly, you say “Hope is our stepmother. Our real mother died when we were eight.” You explain your mother grew up in Halifax and moved to Toronto as a student; that she was a popular novelist who had published several best-sellers before she died of breast cancer at thirty-eight. And you say that your father is an Iranian immigrant and an English literature professor at the university who specializes in the works of Charles Dickens. But Sharon has given you another truth, and you should cherish it: if people ask where you came from, tell them your father was a prince of Persia and your mother a storyteller from Samarkand. And no one could ever really say which one seduced the other.

H.

Charles Dickens was a man of many biographers. To create a fictional version of Ellen Ternan, I have drawn primarily on Peter Ackroyd's
Dickens
and Claire Tomalin's
Charles Dickens: A Life
. Of course, Tomalin is also Ternan's biographer. Her groundbreaking 1990 book,
The Invisible Woman
, was part of what inspired me to imagine how exactly Nelly managed the compromises she did; a postscript to the paperback edition floats the intriguing hypothesis that Dickens suffered his final stroke not in his own home at Gad's Hill but at Peckham with Nelly.

The neglected Catherine Dickens is the subject of an excellent biography and social history by Lillian Nayder,
The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth
. Nayder is the person who actually calculated that Dickens and his wife were probably practising abstinence around the period of his first American tour. Mrs. Dickens' menu
book was originally published as a pamphlet, but it can be found today, reproduced in full, in the culinary history
Dinner for Dickens
by Susan M. Rossi-Wilcox, a book that explains how the family ate and entertained.

We do know that in childhood Dickens read and enjoyed what he called
The Arabian Nights
; he makes numerous references to its characters and settings in his novels. He would have known the stories through popular English translations of the early eighteenth-century French translation by Antoine Galland. There are many versions of
The Thousand and One Nights
—the text is fluid and much disputed—and numerous contemporary reissues of the more scholarly English-language translations that began appearing in the mid-nineteenth century. (I used a recent Penguin edition of Richard Burton's 1880 translation.) But for the contemporary reader who just wants to sample the tales, by far the most delectable taste is to be had in Hanan Al-Shaykh's 2011 retelling,
One Thousand and One Nights
, which features a mere nineteen of Scheherazade's stories.

When it came to fashioning the contemporary characters in
Serial Monogamy
, Hamid Sodeifi, Azar Masoumi and Pegatha Taylor helped me create Al by commenting on the section about his childhood in Tehran. Meanwhile Andrew Taylor advised about academic careers, Hannah Carolan provided information about triple-negative breast cancer and Jane Coults helped with proofreading. I am also indebted to the Toronto Arts Council for a grant that
allowed me time to complete a first draft, while much of my research was conducted at various branches of the ever reliable Toronto Public Library.

My agent Dean Cooke was an enthusiastic advocate for the novel from the start, as was editor Nita Pronovost, who originally acquired an early draft for Doubleday Canada. There it was skilfully massaged by Martha Kanya Forstner, whose wisdom about fictional characters was indispensable. I am always indebted, for their loving support, to my parents, J.H. and Mary Taylor; my husband, Joel Sears; my son, Jed Sears; and my much-missed friend Teresa Mazzitelli, who died while I was researching this book.

KATE TAYLOR was born in France and raised in Ottawa. Her debut novel,
Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen
, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book (Canada/Caribbean region) and the Toronto Book Award. Her second novel,
A Man in Uniform
, was nominated for the Ontario Library Association's Evergreen Award. A recipient of the National Newspaper Award and the Atkinson Fellowship in public policy journalism, she also writes about the arts for
The Globe and Mail
, where she currently serves as lead film critic and writes a weekly column about culture. She lives in Toronto.