of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature.
What would it be like – nay, what would it be? There is no like, no likeness to this question. What would it be, to be a being without language – not an animal, but something nearer to myself?
Here I am, in my inadequate skin, goose-fleshed and shivering. A poor specimen of a creature, with no nose of a dog, and no speed of a horse, and no wings like the invisible buzzards whose cries I hear above me like lost souls, and no fins or even a mermaid’s tail for this wrung-out weather. I am not as well-found as that dormouse disappearing into a crack in the rock. I am a poor specimen of a creature, except that I can think.
In London I was not so content as I am here on the lake and in the Alps, where there is solitude for the mind. London is perpetual; a constant streaming present hurrying towards a receding future. Here, where time is neither so crammed nor so scarce, I fancy, anything might happen, anything is possible.
The world is at the start of something new. We are the shaping spirits of our destiny. And though I am not an inventor of machines I am an inventor of dreams.
Yet I wish I had a cat.
I am now above the roofline of the house, the chimneys poking through the damp cloth of steaming rain like the ears of a giant animal. My skin is covered in beads of clear water as though I have been embroidered with water. There is something fine about my decorated nakedness. My nipples are like the teats of a rain-god. My pubic hair, always thick, teems like a dark shoal. The rain increases steady as a waterfall and me inside it. My eyelids are drenched. I’m wiping my eyeballs with my fists.
Shakespeare. He coined that word: eyeball. What play is it in? Eyeball?
Crush this herb into Lysander’s eye
Whose liquor hath this virtuous property
And make his eye-balls roll with wonted sight.
Then I see it. I think I see it. What do I seem to see?
A figure, gigantic, ragged, moving swiftly on the rocks above me, climbing away from me, his back turned to me, his movements sure, and at the same time hesitant, like a young dog whose paws are too big for him. I thought to call out but I confess I was afraid.
And then the vision was gone.
Surely, I thought, if it is some traveller who has lost his way he will find our villa. But he was climbing away, as though he had found the villa already and passed on.
Troubled that I had indeed seen a figure, equally troubled that I had imagined him, I made my return to the house. I crept in softly, this time through a side door, and, shivering with cold, I made my way up the curve of the staircase.
My husband stood on the landing. I approached him, naked as Eve, and I saw the man of him stir beneath the apron of his shirt.
I was out walking, I said.
Naked? he said.
Yes, I said.
He put out his hand and touched my face.
What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
We were all around the fire that night, the room more shadows than light, for we had few candles, and none could be fetched until the weather bettered.
Is this life a disordered dream? Is the external world the shadow, while the substance is what we cannot see, or touch, or hear, yet apprehend?
Why, then, is this dream of life so nightmarish? Feverish? Sweatish?
Or is it that we are neither dead nor alive?
A being neither dead nor alive.
All my life I have feared such a state, and so it has seemed better to me to live how I can live, and not fear death.
So I left with him at seventeen and these two years have been life to me.
In the summer of 1816 the poets Shelley and Byron, Byron’s physician, Polidori, Mary Shelley and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, by then Byron’s mistress, rented two properties on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Byron enjoyed the grand Villa Diodati, while the Shelleys took a smaller, more charming house, a little lower down the slope.
Such was the notoriety of the households that an hotel on the farther shore of the lake set up a telescope for their guests to watch the antics of the supposed Satanists and Sexualists who held their women in common.
It is true that Polidori was in love with Mary Shelley but she refused to sleep with him. Byron might have slept with Percy Shelley, if Shelley had been so inclined, but there is no evidence of that. Claire Clairmont would have slept with anyone – on this occasion she slept only with Byron. The households spent all their time together – and then it started to rain.
My husband adores Byron. Each day they take a boat out on the lake, to talk about poetry and liberty, whilst I avoid Claire, who can talk about nothing. I must avoid Polidori, who is a lovesick dog.
But then the rain came, and these downpouring days allow for no lake-work.
At least the weather allows no staring at us from the farther shore either. In town I heard the rumour that a guest had spied half a dozen petticoats spread out to dry on Byron’s terrace. In truth, what they saw was bed linen. Byron is a poet but he likes to be clean.
And now we are confined by innumerable gaolers, each formed out of a drop of water. Polidori has brought a girl up from the village to entertain him, and we do what we can on our damp beds, but the mind must be exercised as well as the body.
That night we sat around the steaming fire talking of the supernatural.
Shelley is fascinated by moonlit nights and the sudden sight of ruins. He believes that every building carries an imprint of the past, like a memory, or memories, and that these can be released if the time is right. But what is the right time? I asked him, and he wondered if time itself depends on those who are in time. If time uses us as channels for the past – yes, that must be so, he said, as some people can speak to the dead.
Polidori does not agree. The dead are gone. If we have souls, they do not return. The cadaver on the slab has no hope of resurrection – in this world or the next.
Byron is an atheist and does not believe in life after death. We are haunted by ourselves, he says, and that is enough for any man.
Claire said nothing because she has nothing to say.
The servant brought us wine. It is a relief to have a liquid that is not water.
We are like the drowned, said Shelley.
We drank the wine. The shadows make a world on the walls.
This is our Ark, I said, peopled here, afloat, waiting for the waters to abate.
What do you imagine they talked about, on the Ark, said Byron, shut in with the hot stink of animal? Did they believe that the entire earth sat in a watery envelope, like the foetus in the womb?
Polidori interrupted excitedly (he is a great one for interrupting excitedly). In medical school we had a row of just such foetuses, at varying stages of gestation, all abortions; fingers and toes curled against the inevitable, eyes closed against the light never to be seen.
The light is seen – I said – the mother’s skin stretched over the growing child lets in the light. They turn in joy towards the sun.
Shelley smiled at me. When I was pregnant with William, he used to get on his knees as I sat on the edge of the bed and hold my stomach in his hands like a rare book he hadn’t read.
This is the world in little, he said. And that morning, oh I remember it, we sat in the sun together and I felt my baby kick for joy.
But Polidori is a doctor, not a mother. He sees things differently.
I