Grievance. Marguerite Alexander
the balance of friendship appears to have shifted away from Phoebe towards Nick, who is more her intellectual equal, but he cannot find in himself sufficient reserves of generosity.
They certainly make an attractive couple. Nora’s beauty seems, if anything, enhanced since he first saw her. She isn’t quite so pale, and although she hasn’t lost her elusiveness, the sense she gives of not quite inhabiting her surroundings, she is more animated. As for Nick, Steve is noticing for the first time his rather elfin look – the full but upward-slanting brown eyes, the high cheekbones, hair curling round slightly pointed ears – and tries to resist the thought, worthier of Phoebe than of himself, of legendary Celtic heroes. Only a man as young as Nick, he’s forced to acknowledge, can turn that degree of dishevelment – fraying pullover, trailing shoelaces, battered jeans – to advantage. He is himself reaching the age when, if he were to attempt such a look, he’d risk being mistaken for a tramp.
‘What I want to know,’ says Annie, ‘is how we should “read” Thady. He calls himself “honest” Thady all the time, but isn’t it a bit like “honest” Iago? He turns a blind eye, after all, when his son grows up and systematically rips the family off. He strikes me as a cunning old sod, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ says Nick, who, when he speaks, doesn’t look at Steve, but keeps his eyes lowered, as though the open book in his lap has more claim on his attention, ‘when you read Castle Rackrent what you mostly experience is irony, just as when you read Swift. As Annie said, you don’t know how to “read” Thady, but that applies to almost everything in the book. I suppose you could say that that’s the literary expression of a kind of ambivalence in the Irish situation.’
He’s certainly good, Steve thinks, noticing that Nora has kept her eyes attentively on Nick while he’s been speaking. He wonders whether, like the conscientious students they are, they’ve been discussing the novel in advance of the class. Which would make him an indirect facilitator of their relationship.
‘That’s right,’ says Steve, aware that he’s withholding from Nick the praise he’s earned. ‘But how in particular is Thady an expression of that ambivalence?’
In the silence that follows, Nick catches Nora’s eye and nods, as though encouraging her to take up the challenge.
‘Thady is a dependant in the Rackrent household,’ she says, ‘so it’s important to him to maintain the goodwill of his masters. One of the things they require is admiration. Perhaps we’re meant to think that he really does admire them on some level. They’re presented as generous, and that always goes down well. But the position of dependency often involves some kind of underhand activity to secure its own interests. If we were to go for a psychological interpretation, we might say that he presents to the reader his love for them but represses his resentment.’
Steve is struck, as he often is, by the impersonality of her tone. He would be the first to insist that a scholarly debate isn’t the occasion for personal anecdote and reminiscence, which tend to mark the contributions of weaker students like Phoebe. He senses in Nora, however, an imperative that has little to do with observing convention. It’s as though she’s at pains always to establish an objective truth in which she has nothing invested.
Perversely, this thought brings him back to Thady, whose narrative is so slippery and open to interpretation because, as a servant, everything he says is subject to constraint. It seems to Steve that, while the effect is so different, Nora, like Thady, has no authentic voice. Is this because, in London, she feels obliged to conform to an idiom that is alien to her, or is there another reason that might, in time, reveal itself?
For all that, she shows a growing confidence in her chosen idiom and he speculates on whether any of the others is nursing a grievance towards her. The likeliest candidates would seem to be Phoebe or Emma or one of what he characterises as the huddled masses, who sit there taking notes but rarely speak, whose names he’s been careful to memorise but, beyond that, is content to leave be. So it’s a surprise when Pete, whose presence in the group is unfailingly benevolent, responds in a way that might be interpreted as hostile.
‘Is that how you feel about us, Nora?’
Steve wonders whether to intervene but, because he, too, is curious, holds back for the time being, keeping in reserve the right to slap Pete down if necessary.
Nora turns round sharply and says, ‘I can’t see the point you’re making.’
‘It just occurred to me that, as an Irish person inhabiting an English reality, you might feel that kind of ambivalence towards us. I’m sorry, I’m probably completely out of order, but I’m just testing the assumptions we’re making about the novel against life.’
There is, as far as Steve can tell, no malice in his tone. On the other hand, he is clearly seizing the opportunity to break Nora’s guard.
Again, Nora chooses her words carefully, so that Steve considers at what cost to herself spontaneity is so routinely denied. ‘I don’t think my situation is directly comparable to that of a fictional character in a Protestant Ascendancy household in a novel written two hundred years ago. As far as more recent history’s concerned, I don’t believe in bearing grudges towards individuals who aren’t directly responsible.’ As she finishes, she gives a tight little smile, which Pete returns more broadly.
‘Just checking,’ he says.
In order to bring closure, Steve says, ‘I think we should avoid personalising this. As far as your more general point is concerned, Pete, it’s a valid one. Thady presents an unstable self, an unstable perspective on the world he inhabits because the terms of that world are largely dictated by other people.’
That, Steve hopes, will deal not just with this matter but with Castle Rackrent more generally. He’s had enough. He doesn’t want to look, or avoid looking, at Nick and Nora sitting side by side, and speculate, or avoid speculating, about their relationship outside this room – whether they’ll go back somewhere together, eat together, laugh together, sleep together. Except that, Steve’s instinct tells him, there’s still something untouched about Nora. But for how long? Like Pete, he’s finding that the pressure of lived experience is displacing the theoretical speculation that he once found so seductive. He wants desperately to be on his own and to think about all of this, and to go home and lick his wounds after the blow he received this morning…
‘I don’t think we should ignore the gender perspective on all of this.’
‘Go ahead,’ Steve says. It was too much to hope that they might get through an entire class without Emma Leigh putting her oar in.
‘Wouldn’t you say that, as a woman, Maria Edgeworth brought a particular perspective to Thady’s position? That as a woman in a male-dominated society she, too, was living in a world whose terms had been dictated by other people? And that this helped her develop an empathy towards servants and other dispossessed people?’
If only it were that simple, Steve thinks. Even as a man who prefers the company of women, he’s not sure that he’s willing to cede to them all claims to virtue on quite these grounds.
Before he has to answer, Pete says, ‘Hang on a minute. Are you saying that being a woman cancels out every other advantage? That every woman, however fortunate, is on a level with the lowest in society? She was the daughter of a rich, enlightened landowner, and was educated and treated as an equal by her father, unless the bloke who wrote the introduction I read got it all wrong.’
‘Right,’ says Emma. ‘But what she suffered from having such a prominent father was that nobody believed she wrote the books herself. Everybody thought they were really her father’s work.’
‘Then she’s had the last laugh,’ says Pete. ‘The old man’s only remembered now as Maria Edgeworth’s dad, so justice has been done.’
‘And Dombey and Son was a daughter after all,’ says Steve, as he gathers up his belongings. Since Emma ducked answering a serious point that deserved addressing, allowing instead her self-righteousness to get the better of her, her