Behind the Mountain
Evie Wyld
Published by The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Foreword © Tracy Chevalier 2016
Behind the Mountain © Evie Wyld 2016
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Jacket photograph © Dan Saelinger/Trunk Archive
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the authors’ imaginations.
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Source ISBN: 9780008150594
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008173425
Version: 2016-03-16
Contents
Behind the Mountain – Evie Wyld
Why is Charlotte Brontë’s “Reader, I married him” one of the most famous lines in literature? Why do we remember it and quote it so much?
Jane Eyre is “poor, obscure, plain, and little”, with no family and no prospects; the embodiment of the underdog who ultimately triumphs. And “Reader, I married him” is Jane’s defiant conclusion to her rollercoaster story. It is not, “Reader, he married me” – as you would expect in a Victorian society where women were supposed to be passive; or even, “Reader, we married.” Instead Jane asserts herself; she is the driving force of her narrative, and it is she who chooses to be with Rochester. Her self-determination is not only very appealing; it also serves to undercut the potential over-sweetness of a classic happy ending where the heroine gets her man. The mouse roars, and we pump our fist with her.
Twenty-one writers, then, have taken up this line and written what it has urged them to write. I liken it to a stone thrown into a pond, with its resulting ripples. Always, always in these stories there is love – whether it is the first spark or the last dying embers – in its many heart-breaking, life-affirming forms.
All of these stories have their own memorable lines, their own truths, their own happy or wry or devastating endings, but each is one of the ripples that finds its centre in Jane and Charlotte’s decisive clarion call: Reader, I married him.
Tracy Chevalier
ONE OF HER DREAMS involves being at the crest of a large wave about to break on a steep sea wall. It is the beach at Deal, flat and grey with a long stretch of pebbles leading up to the promenade. The shoreline is a jumble of barbed wire and the rusting skeletons of beach defences. The concrete is sheer, enormous. The wave, though huge, will break only halfway up the wall, and then she will be dropped by it and churned again into a new wave, beaten against the wall until she is broken into pieces. She thinks of her son, and how he’ll take the news, his housemaster calling him out of class, the necessity of his bravery. Her husband will be fine – relieved, perhaps. The part of blameless widower will suit him.
She wakes and is still in Canada and the war is over. And there is her husband next to her, flannel pyjamas against the chill that never quite leaves the house, despite the assurances of the bank that everything is top of the range. Her husband always appears to be wearing a suit, even in sleep. On the boat over, he’d sat out on deck in the sun, wearing cufflinks, shoes shining, sweating. She makes herself touch his back so that he turns, and she smiles and says, “Good morning, darling,” to break the spell of sleep, and she watches him reach for a response, roll over and touch her hair, one of his four necessary shows of intimacy for the day.
“How did you sleep?” he asks. The both of them, she thinks, are trying and only failing on the inside.
She runs through the day’s errands. Collect the rib roast from the butcher for lunch at the weekend, contact an upholsterer – there is an old mouse hole in the sofa that has split and stretched open so it displays the innards, and if one of their Saturday lunchtime guests moves the magazine stand, it will be exposed. The mouse hole is really the bank’s problem – the house came fully furnished, and her husband has told her, Anything you don’t like, we can change. She will not say, Take me home to my son. She will not say, Reverse time and let me make a different decision about everything. She must decide on a dessert for Saturday. Send out one of the fortnightly care boxes to Sherborne, and try not to think of the twitching canes of the housemasters.
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