Work Text:
Hannah’s leafing through one of the former Lady Croom’s garden books (I cannot decide whether it is Mr Noakes himself, or his wild fantasies regarding my garden, which I find the more objectionable) when Chloe appears, clutching a giant mug of tea and still wearing her pyjamas. Hannah considers asking about her health – either physical (Chloe looks hungover), or mental (Chloe, Bernard, and the arrival of Chloe’s mother) – but she’s never been one for personal questions.
Chloe, of course, feels no such compunction. “God, I feel actually vile,” she announces, sliding into what looks to once have been an extremely valuable Chippendale chair (now fit only for a schoolroom; which apparently has been its use, if one goes by the carved abuse of someone called Monty). “Someone spiked the punch with tequila. Actually, I think someone spiked everything with tequila. What are you doing?”
Hannah lifted up the book so Chloe could see. “Still on the garden books. I thought I’d go back and read the early entries in the light of… well, everything.”
Chloe nods. “Bernard’s dahlia. Maybe it’ll turn out that Byron was never here at all, and Val’s gamebook got it wrong, and it was someone else. Or someone pretending to be him, like a con or something. Not that it really matters.”
Hannah looks at her, curious. “You don’t think history matters?”
Chloe sips her tea and shrugs. “Well, it just strikes me as being a bit pointless. I mean, whether Byron shot what’s-his-name or he got bitten by a monkey or his wife pushed him overboard so she could shag the captain. What you end up with is a load of poetry and a dwarf dahlia from Jamaica.”
”Martinique.”
“Wherever. Val’s right, mostly. I think it’s what you’ve got now that matters. That’s what’s real, because you never really know any of the other stuff anyway. It’s just guess-work.”
Hannah thinks about her research, about her epiphany, about the gothic novel expressed in landscape and the decline from thinking to feeling. “They say that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it,” she says.
Chloe pulls a face. “Bollocks. People do stupid things all the time that have gone wrong before – look at Hitler invading Russia.” She sighs. “Look at me and Bernard.”
Hannah thinks she would prefer not to look, but that seems unkind. “Not so good?” she prompts.
Chloe scrapes a fingernail over the forgotten Monty. “It was fine, really, before Mummy. Except Bernard starting falling over himself trying to explain, then he actually fell over his trousers and the whole thing got a bit ridiculous. Not quite what I imagined, you know? And the thing is, Mummy wouldn’t really care.” She brightens slightly. “Still, it’s all experience, right? There’s no point to life if you’re not going to do anything.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge died in 1834, the same year as the hermit of Croom Hall, who was probably Septimus Hodge. They leave behind poetry and a paragraph in a book. Hannah will leave behind books, too, and when she is long dead people might still read what she wrote.
But Chloe’s still talking, about Bernard and boys and her plans for the future, and Hannah wonders whether Chloe, though she may not leave anything behind, will have led a more worthwhile life, while she, despite her work, has never really done anything.