In Search of Mary Page 4

  Like the practical side: a few tantalizing hints are sprinkled in about her immediate purpose. There are references here and there to her “business”. What exactly is going on? Here’s what we now know: Imlay has licensed a French ship with Norwegian papers and a Norwegian crew. It sets sail with a cargo of aristocratic silver from revolutionary France to neutral Sweden, where they can trade it for corn.

  But the ship goes missing, last heard of in the care of the Norwegian captain, Peder Ellefsen. Ellefsen has since reappeared and is swanning around Norway saying he knows nothing about it. Imlay wants his silver and his ship. He gives Wollstonecraft the legal authority to represent him, and to collect money or damages on his behalf. Wollstonecraft’s trail has two purposes: to retrieve Imlay’s lost treasure and hers. Her lost love.

  One morning I put the breakfast things out on the table in the style of a magician’s assistant, clear my throat, and announce “Girls. Look at this.” They stop squabbling while I reverentially prop Letters from Norway up against the milk.

  “Here’s a mum who did lots of travelling, with her baby, hundreds of years ago.”

  Will reaches out to grab.

  “Mary Wollstonecraft wrote an important book along the way, and she was secretly on a treasure hunt – NO Will, don’t get porridge on her!”

  “A treasure hunt? Is that why there’s a boat?” They point at the stormy cover image.

  “Yes. And she did all this ages ago, and she didn’t have any family supporting her, or any teachers to help her.”

  “Like Ms Stevenson?”

  “No, no one like Ms Stevenson. She had to teach herself, in a time when lots of people thought girls shouldn’t even bother learning but just sit around being quiet.”

  They look at me blankly and before one of them has time to say “actually that sounds pretty cool” I hurry on: “It’s like those Grimm stories we’ve been reading. Like a quest. She goes out into the world to try to fix something. But she meets all sorts of problems.”

  “Wizards disguised as a rook?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Does she marry a prince?”

  “NO! I mean, no.”

  “And is there a happy ending?”

  “Well, no.”

  On her departure, Wollstonecraft declares: “I am going towards the North in search of sunbeams!” On our departure, the enchanted and long-awaited day, I spring up at five o’clock and the sun is already up. I heave my rucksack on and pull my warm, reluctant baby from his cot. Off we set. In the airport queue I am reduced nearly to tears by the hateful rucksack. It’s already killing me and we’re still in bloody London. It is a vast, extending one with confusing straps all over, bought by Justin for one of his macho mountain trips. I have packed it badly; it sways away from me at the top, and if I lean down to Will in his buggy it lurches forward, hitting the back of my head. This can’t be right.

  But once we’re on board I have the first “moment”. A moment of pure triumph. I secretly smile. Will has fallen asleep and is perfectly arranged in a blanket on the seat next to me, limbs splayed out in the paradise of wanton baby sleep. One of his feet rests on my leg. His face looks fatter when he’s asleep, his eyelashes rest on his cheeks.

  I lean contentedly back, watching the small televisual aeroplane set out across the globe. I’ve always loved that plane. This one veers north, an intrepid direction, the obvious route being south. I bask in my contrary northerliness and breezily compare it to her eleven days on the rough seas from Hull to the Skagerrak.

  Another self-congratulatory thrill comes with the solving of the “how to write” conundrum. Instead of a laptop, I’ve brought along a small Dictaphone. I pull it out of my bag now that he’s asleep and have a furtive practice. The plan is to mumble into it, hands free, every time I have a thought. Those thoughts arrive right here on the page some time in the future, when I’ve got childcare.

  We land in Gothenburg, Sweden. Gothenburg is where Wollstonecraft left her baby and the maid behind with some family friends, in preparation to undertake the next – more perilous – stage of the adventure alone. I’ve yet to find a friendly family I can dump Will with.

  “Looks like I’m stuck with you then.” I tell him.

  He smiles. I smile back, tighten up the floppy, corpse-like rucksack and load us into our hire car.

  The hire car is how I overcame the vexing problem of the five-hour mixture of buses and trains between the airport and the ferry. The problem that my friend found to be so very unlike Touching the Void. Not that that comment still rankles or anything.

  So we drive up Sweden, listening to Swedish radio and looking at Swedish scenery. I chatter away to Will, who doesn’t answer and is most probably asleep back there in his baby seat. I only just about managed to cram him into it – one of those little round ones like a half nutshell. His legs poke out, jumbled like a hermit crab. The landscape soars up on both sides of the road. It’s still just like she says – there are fir trees and rocks everywhere. It’s a landscape a child could draw: Christmas trees, zigzag mountain tops, box-shaped houses.

  The trip in Wollstonecraft’s determined footsteps leads us north from Gothenburg, up to Strömstad, which is where Wollstonecraft set sail. We too will embark here, taking the ferry over to Norway, then pressing onwards to Tønsberg, Risør and other places featuring Os with a line through them. I practise them out loud as I drive. But shortly before we reach Strömstad I get lost. We turn around and go back on ourselves. Will contributes nothing to my running commentary on where we went wrong. Surely this wouldn’t happen with Wollstonecraft at the wheel. But hang on, maybe it does…

  She’s also heading north to Strömstad, but in an overnight horse-drawn coach. The other passengers are asleep. She stares out at the night summer sky of “clear softened blue”. As she watches, the sun begins to rise, with “a kind of expectation that made me almost afraid to breathe, lest I should break the charm. I saw the sun – and sighed”. Moments later the spell is further broken: a fellow passenger wakes and starts swearing at the driver. They’ve missed a turning and have to retrace their route. Unlike me, Wollstonecraft doesn’t care. Despite having been up all night with her “orient beams” and “watery clouds”, by the time they get to Strömstad she’s bang up for it:

  The wind had changed in the night, and my boat was ready. A dish of coffee and fresh linen recruited my spirits, and I directly set out again for Norway.

  I love this woman. Relentless. Indomitable. And does that fresh linen bit mean that she changes her underwear? I have a coffee at Strömstad too, while we wait for our Norway-bound ferry. I’m still in the same knickers though. But they’re my best, saved out of the laundry especially for this momentous day. I inhale the coffee and her valour once more.

  A dish of coffee and fresh linen recruited my spirits, and I directly set out again for Norway.

  On board the Strömstad ferry is the most lavish buffet lunch I have ever attempted to ingest. With free booze. So by the time we totter up on deck to look for Norway, Will and I are feeling good. Very good. The ferry is white, with rows of orange lifeboats; the sky is a soft blue. The sea is flat, gently wrinkled by a breeze. The only whiteness on the sea is the wake of our boat. These are not the dark raging depths I had envisaged, but even so, the danger lurches inside me as we approach the railings. Will feels tiny. I gather him tight to my chest, his face in my neck, and sniff his thin baby hair.

  Suddenly, there it is. A rocky, rocky coastline. Sharp intake of breath. I feel I recognize it: it’s exactly as it should be. Tiny islands. Countless rocks poking above the sea. It doesn’t look gentle. There’s no sand: only bare rock. Distant layers of fir-tree-covered mountains on the horizon. I spot my first Norwegian house, a yellowy box balancing on a rock, and look around eagerly for someone I can point it out to. Look – an actual Norwegian house! But the people around us are Norwegians. They’ve come to do their household shopping more cheaply in Sweden. They’ve got their tartan wheely trollies l
oaded up with toilet roll, nappies and shampoo. I laugh out loud and hug Will to my chest again.

  We set foot (my feet, Will’s wheels) on Norway at seven o’clock in the evening, on the 8th of June. It’s warm, the light is buttery golden, bits of white tree fluff drift down, backlit in the sunshine. Long shadows. We head across town and board the train for Tønsberg. I finally dare to count the remaining number of times that I will have to hoik the deadweight of rucksack on and off my back. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to bring so many books. Rows of blood blisters now mark my upper arms. I decide that my baggage is emblematic. Wollstonecraft travelled with a broken heart, the victim of Imlay’s infidelity. The rucksack is my tribute to her burden.

  The train pulls in to Tønsberg at last. With the Rucksack of Piety on my back, and Will’s buggy in front, I push onwards up the hill in search of our hostel. It’s steep. I count back over the modes of transport we’ve ticked off today. I can’t wait to reach the hostel. I get out of breath and wipe the sweat from my face. Then I get lost and come back down the hill. I ask a man in a car where the hostel is. He tells us to go back up the hill. It’s still sunny and very hot. Will rubs his eyes and starts to cry. I want to cry too. I begin to swear out loud. Touching the Void my arse.

  The next morning Will and I wake up in fairy-tale land. I’m in a little wooden bunk bed, top bunk. He’s in a cot with embroidered sheets depicting a lamb in a bonnet. It’s nine o’clock, and we’ve both slept a ton. I give thanks to the parents’ supreme deity, the god of sleep, that Will didn’t hassle me in the night. We stretch and smile at each other. We go for breakfast in a white room full of frilly old furniture. It’s charming – jam in quaint unmatching bowls, creamy honey, perfect bread. White eggs in a basket. The kind of food that Little Red Riding Hood took to her granny.

  Tønsberg is a pretty coastal town to the south of Oslo, a jumble of many-coloured wooden houses that look like attractive garden sheds. Wollstonecraft loves it here. She makes this the base for her treasure-hunting ventures. Here she gathers herself together. She begins to recover from life as a destitute foreign single mum living in the French Reign of Terror, and from her attempted suicide.

  Wollstonecraft enthuses about the humanity of Norway’s justice system, calls Norway “the most free community I have ever observed”, and relates a number of odd local legends, adding that she has “formed a very just opinion of the character of the Norwegians, without being able to hold converse with them”. She praises their “artless kindness” and dishes out counsel to farmers on how they should be selling their produce, and mothers on how they should be bringing up their kids. She learns to row, swims in the sea, drinks the local well-water and begins to feel “renovated”.

  Wollstonecraft never sits still for long. Between the bouts of observing, writing and lecturing, she’s forever shooting off “over hedge and ditch” on bracing walks. I want just to potter, amble, daydream in her restless onwards steps. And unlike her, I doubt very much that we’ll be going for a swim today. Cold rain is pouring insistently out of a dark sky. I tuck the plastic rain-shelter bubble over Will’s buggy and borrow an umbrella from the hostel.

  We’re meeting Ursula Houge, Tønsberg’s eminent historical tour guide. She will take us to the places where Wollstonecraft relaxed, posted off her stream of unhappy letters to Imlay and dined out with Tønsberg’s finest. Ursula has white hair in a bob, the correct clothing for Norwegian weather, and appropriate shoes. She zooms up the hill at a fair old clip, throwing out historical facts left and right.

  Will and I try to keep up. His buggy is stupidly large, one of those off-road things. I brought it because it doubles as a bed. And this is exactly what it feels like: pushing a bed uphill. But as we push upwards we make a fortunate discovery. It turns out that our hostel on the hill, chosen purely for economic reasons, sits immediately below Wollstonecraft’s favourite spot.

  This is not just any old hill. Tønsberg is the oldest town in Norway. And here, looming over us amid some older ruins, is a tower called the Slottsfjellet. It’s more good-looking than it sounds. The ancient royal Ynglings lived here in the first millennium, and King Haakon Haakonsson fought off the Danes here in 1253. This site has seen centuries of battles, sieges, fortifications, royal weddings and deaths, before it became the favourite private dreaming place for a philosopher who wanted to make the world better but couldn’t sort out her own life. And now us. Polite people walking round in circles in the endless rain. We’ve found her place. Right here, Wollstonecraft sits and writes, overlooking the town and the surrounding sea:

  …the white sails as turned the cliffs, or seemed to take shelter under the pines which covered the little islands that so gracefully rose to render the terrific ocean beautiful. The fishermen were calmly casting their nets; whilst the seagulls hovered over the unruffled deep.

  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:

  Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue, and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

  “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.

  Here I have frequently strayed, sovereign of the was
te; I seldom met any human creature – and sometimes, reclining on the mossy down, under the shelter of a rock, the prattling of the sea amongst the pebbles has lulled me to sleep…

  You have sometimes wondered, my dear friend, at the extreme affection of my nature – but such is the temperature of my soul… For years have I endeavoured to calm an impetuous tide… It was striving against the stream – I must love and admire with warmth, or I sink into sadness.

  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.”