Afterlives

[Female voice, a librarian in her 30s-40s; speaking on the phone, very assured manner, stamping books in the pauses]

They say never give away the ending, but of course there’s endings and there’s endings. I’ve worked here for fifteen years and I can tell you, most people who take books out from our fiction section simply have no idea how to tell a given ending from a true one.

[Pause]

Oh you know, the endings that actually happened, not just whatever nonsense you read on the final page. That’s just the little bow the author tries to wrap around the story. The naïve reader can’t grasp the difference, but the experienced reader – the informed reader – always knows how things really turned out. In the long term, I mean.

[Pause]

Well indeed, Ms. Austen is a case in point. We all know how she liked to spin a yarn privately about her characters’ lives together, once the ‘happily married’ stuff was out of the way, but her own notions are pretty half-cocked, if you ask me – she was clearly avoiding some of the more… unappetizing… details.

[Pause]

Well, Elizabeth Darcy for one. If you know how things actually turned out you’ll know she got a little too ‘free’ in conversation with her husband, took one verbal liberty too many – the victim, it turns out, of a wonderfully-contrived plot by Georgina to encourage her sister-in-law in precisely that tendency, knowing full well where it would all lead. The new, improved Darcy was apparently all smiles and tolerance until the inevitable happened – some tasteless joke about overly damp underwear after his morning ablutions – and that was that, she’d gone too far, the thing was over. I suppose one has to admire Georgina for a dark horse, and it goes to show why middle-class girls shouldn’t try to claw their way into the aristocracy, but you won’t expect to hear any of that from Austen herself.

[Pause]

Absolutely. It’s a clear-cut case of why one should never trust the author with their own story. I could tell you more, but not everyone has the stomach for these things…

[Pause]

Well Rochester and Jane, for instance. All the signs of Edward’s full religious conversion were there for Jane to see before the final nuptial, but she was too busy sitting on his knee poking him in the ribs to notice. For a couple of years it was bearable – I mean he couldn’t very well ask her to sit and read the Bible at him wholesale for days on end – but once he’d got a bit of sight back it was God’s Grace and Good Works from sunup till sundown and a lifetime of the missionary position stretching out before her. In the end she realized she’d just got another St. John Rivers on her hands, only this one she had to wheel about all day, so when the talk turned to hauling him out to Tibet so he could proselytize at the monks there, she suddenly discovered how handy a fully-functioning pair of legs could be. She was off, she was out.

[Pause]

Lawrence? Ah, things didn’t go so well for Ursula and Rupert Birkin either, you mightn’t be surprised to hear. Against all expectations – not to mention Rupert’s preference for some highly prophylactic coital practices – they ended up conceiving a child together. And while three in a marriage might, by mutual agreement, be all well and good, adding an unexpected fourth – especially one who had so little to contribute by way of a philosophy of mysticism – stretched things to breaking point. I’m afraid for Ursula it was either him or it, and at least ‘it’ wasn’t inclined to reject the breast on principle.

[Pause]

So yes, I mean once you know the rules, once you’ve learned to piece together the overall trajectory of these things then you’ll see that hardly any of these stories end satisfactorily. The Moorish wall collapsed on top of poor Molly Bloom after she went back to Gibraltar in a bid to reignite the fires of her first dalliance. Whether it was the fault of her unsteady high notes as she worked her ‘Yes’s up into a cadenza, or the pressure of her avowedly ample backside against the wall’s mid-section, it was too much for a stretch of brickwork eroded by centuries’ worth of assignations. A robust lover like Boylan might have been able to pull her from under the rubble, but of course she’d taken along poor weedy Stephen: equipped to lift a skirt, perhaps, but not much in the way of fallen masonry. Nor was it plain sailing (if that is the mot juste) for Maxim and the second Mrs de Winters on their post-Manderley travels. Maxim’s absent-minded habit of leaving unextinguished cigarettes lying around eventually caught up with him and he went up in a fireball one sunny afternoon in a hotel named, of all things, Danny’s, somewhere on the Ionian islands. The young Mrs de Winters escaped the blaze as she’d been out that day haggling with a cricket tout, but it later transpired that, due to an unfortunate clerical oversight, the remainder of the estate had been left to the spaniel, so she was left as penniless as when she’d started. Rhett Butler ended up working in a gay brothel, his personal quest for “grace and symmetry like Grecian art” leading him a route he doubtless hadn’t anticipated. But financially he was by now a broken man after a volte-face from Scarlett concerning Ashley, divorce, and not giving a damn; and there was good money to be made servicing uppity carper-baggers with a yen for the déclassé Southern Stud type. The hard truth is, I’m afraid, that no story you can think of ended the way the writers like to pretend it did. Certainly not happily, unless you count the New Testament, I suppose. Jesus never died on the cross, you know. Wealthy backers and vested interests made sure he was up there a few hours, of course, but it was no trick back then to pass off an unconscious man as a dead one; and a retirement fund took care of convalescence and a quiet trip out to India once the dust had settled. But of course, that wouldn’t have made for such a good ending.

[Shifts out of phone voice to address a customer]

[Icily] Yes, madam, I’ll be with you when I’m finished.