Becoming George Sand

Rosalind Brackenbury

Description

A married woman’s affair makes her reconsider the nature of love in this “beautiful, wise novel” (Edmund White).

Maria Jameson is having an affair—a passionate, life-changing affair. Yet she wonders whether this has to mean an end to the love she shares with her husband.
 
For answers to the question of whether it is possible to love two men at once, she reaches across the centuries to George Sand, the maverick French novelist. Immersing herself in the life of this revolutionary woman who took numerous lovers, Maria struggles with the choices women make, and wonders if women in the nineteenth century might have been more free, in some ways, than their twenty-first-century counterparts.
 
As these two narratives intertwine—following George through her affair with Frédéric Chopin, following Maria through her affair with an Irish professor—this novel explores the personal and the historical, the demands of self and the mysteries of the heart.
 
“This is not so much a story about having a love affair as it is a study of the nature of love itself. I was absolutely knocked out by it.” —Elizabeth Berg

Sujets

• Gender role
• Cheating
• Torn Between Two Lovers

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 17 mars 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780547524344
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Secret
The Bitter Paths of Majorca
Real Life
Corambé
The House on the Creuse
Consolation
The Owl
Acknowledgements
About the Author
First U. S. edition

Copyright © 2009 Rosalind Brackenbury

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

First published in Canada by Doubleday, 2009

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Brackenbury, Rosalind. Becoming George Sand / Rosalind Brackenbury.—1st U.S. ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-547-37054-5 1. Women teachers—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 3. Sand, George, 1804–1876—Fiction. I. Title. PR 6052. R 24 B 44 2011 823'.914—dc22 2010002436

e ISBN 978-0-547-52434-4
v3.0915
 
In memory of Elisabeth
 
“ Presque tous les romans sont des histoires d’amour. ”
GEORGE SAND
1
Secret
M ARIA CROSSES THE STREET, where the cars are parked under their bonnets of snow, and only the swerving tracks of tires have left their ribbed marks. She’s a little early, but in a couple of minutes the one o’clock gun from the castle will sound across the city, and wherever he is, still in his lab feeding his mice before shutting them up for the day, or hanging up his lab coat, reaching for his thick tweed overcoat, he’ll hear it and think, she’ll be there, she’ll be waiting.
Buccleuch Street, Edinburgh, Scotland. A Friday in December. Friday afternoon. She’s been longing for it all week. She peers in through the glass door, and pushes against it so that a bell rings her arrival like in an old-fashioned grocery shop, and she comes in with clumps of wet snow on her boots to melt on the doormat, and a sense of having reached the next, important stage of the day. She breathes out, a long sigh that nobody should hear.
At first glance it looks as if there’s nobody in the shop, but she feels rather than hears a slight flurry out of sight and then sees the bookseller at the back, bent over and sorting books. There are boxes stacked, and the woman is unpacking them to put out on the shelves. She comes out, straightening herself, pushing back a strand of her hair. She has the slightly anxious look of a shy person who’s afraid that what she says and does may not be appropriate. She also shows for an instant that she knows Maria, but she hides this knowledge, personal, even embarrassing, behind her professional manners. Maria is wearing the long dark blue coat she usually wears, still flecked with snow. Snow melts on her hair and her gloved hands—she’s kept her gloves on, so that her skimming of pages where she stands, at a shelf of books that have been laid face up for easy examination, looks more like passing the time than any real curiosity. She looks up from the book she isn’t reading, a collection of Maupassant stories, and smiles.
“Hi.” She knows that the woman knows she’s waiting.
“Good morning.”
“Sorry if I startled you.”
“Oh, no, that’s fine. Just, I didn’t really think anyone would come in today. Who would have thought it, more snow.”
“Mmm, it was forecast, though.”
Maria keeps her conversation to a polite but distracted murmur to indicate that she has come in here to find something she has not yet quite thought of. Bookshops are places where you can take your mind off waiting. Her hands hold the book as if it were a passport, one gloved finger dividing pages.
She says vaguely, “I wonder if you have any George Sand?”
The bookshop is a small independent one tucked away in an alley at the back of Buccleuch Place, not the larger, brighter, newly chained university bookshop where students mostly go to order the books they are going to be made to read. It specializes in French literature and books in translation. You can get yesterday’s Le Monde here, and even Libération. Maria sometimes wonders how it can keep going, but then there are all the guidebooks too, and books about how to buy houses in France, how to cook like a French person, how to stay thin, and Peter Mayle.
“Oh, yes.” The woman seems relieved to be asked about an actual book. “There’s a course, isn’t there, the French Romantics. I have some of the novels in stock, and the letters to Musset. That’s all for now. But you know the big new letters to Flaubert will be out soon? It’s being translated, I believe. Are you teaching Sand?”
“No, but I’m reading her. I’m thinking of writing about her. I’d like to order the Flaubert letters, but I want them in the original.”
“Right, well, I can do that.” The woman goes off to look on the computer behind her desk, runs her eye up and down the screen, her hand competent on the mouse. She has grey-brown hair, most of it scraped back, and a profile that belongs on a Greek coin, Maria thinks, very pure and classical. She knows from the woman’s glance at her that she knows. There’s an odd tension between them, as if both are wondering together, will he come?
Maria stands there, snow turning to damp stains on her coat and in her dark hair. The bookseller is placing her order.
“Excuse me, your name? I know you, of course, you’ve been in here before, but.”
“Maria Jameson. Like the whisky.”
Then the door swings open with the clang of the bell again and he comes in, cold air rushing in with him. On the street, a dark day, white gulls swooping white between the granite buildings, falling and rising in the gusts of snow. His coat flies open, he’s blazing, in spite of the cold, and the red scarf at his neck flies out like a flag. His glance goes straight to Maria—who still stands with the unread book in her hands, any book will do, as a passport, an alibi, she’s put down the Maupassant, picked up something on Derrida—and then quickly scans the bookshelves, the carpets, the woman bending as if to hide herself behind the computer. Then he looks at Maria again. The challenge of him: I’m here. She drops the book back into a pile, as he puts out a hand to touch her arm, meaning, let’s go. She’s moving towards him as if pulled by magnets, in spite of books and furniture, as if no mere object can stand in her way.
The bookseller says mildly, “There, that’s done, you should have it in a week at the latest. Can you leave me a phone number? Or I can send you an e-mail?”
Maria scribbles her address, e-mail and phone number, no longer thinking about Flaubert’s letters to George Sand and hers to him; those will have to wait. The bookseller retreats to her stack of cardboard boxes, to count books. She almost scuttles. Maria pays no more attention to her except to say a cursory, “Goodbye, thanks so much,” because he is here, tall and eager and thin, with snow on his curly dark hair and his cold bare hands. She’s flowing towards him, they have this brief time in the middle of the day, and it’s all they have, the clock has begun to tick already. The woman in the bookshop is neither here nor there; she was an intermediary, a necessary stage on the way; later Maria will come back here alone and check on the other books she needs to order, but now she is going ahead of him out of the shop, into the street, into the blowing snow, between the iron-grey of walls and in the flurry of flakes flying sideways blown by the wind, forging her necessary way. The streets and sidewalks are icy beneath the latest fall of snow. But they stride together as if the day were warm, the air benign, the ground sure beneath their feet; they walk close, she looking up at him, laughing, he bending close to say something into her ear. They pass before the glass windows of the bookshop’s front and are gone.

She opens the front door with her own key and they both go in, she leading the way. She picks up damp mail from the inside mat, places it on the hall table; even now she has the impulse to tidy things, even with him coming in close behind her like a tall shadow in his dark coat, even with the burning feeling she already has inside. The house is silent, with the dense silence of having been empty of its occupants for several hours. She feels it instantly, its moods and atmospheres. There’s clutter in the hall, boots kicked off—Emily’s old ones—too many coats hung on the back of the door, a sports bag nobody has claimed. There’s still a faint smell of breakfast, old toast and coffee. The cat comes running, wiping herself around their legs. Edward left early this morning to go to the Department, and the children are at school till late afternoon, after which both of them are going to friends’ houses for tea. Edward has a meeting and will then play squash, then bridge, with his friend Martin. She turns to smile back at the man coming in after her, yes, come in, it’s safe, it’s fine. They collide in the hall as she turns to shut the door, he holds her arm, it’s all right, relax, we are here. The house is their space for now, and they have time. It’s Friday, their best day, their longest, freest, the day to which all others bear no comparison. Friday, and she will soon have everything she wants, it will all