On Jane Gardam
Hetty Sleeping
Unconcerned with portraying life in all its mundanity, the short story, with its early roots in Edgar Allan Poe, often fixes on that liminal space between everyday and alternate reality. I came across a brilliant example of this in a collection by Jane Gardam. I’ve only recently become acquainted with Gardam, though she’s over ninety years old with dozens of books behind her, and the only writer to have twice won the Whitbread Book Award (now the Costa Book Award).
“Hetty Sleeping” opens her collection, The Stories of Jane Gardam, published by Europa Editions in 2014. In order to get to the heart of the story, we have to dispense with the question that follows the first reading of any narrative: what happens? Here a British woman encounters a lover from ten years prior on the coast of Ireland. She reconnects with him while on a holiday with her children; her husband has been detained. Her lover visits their rented house, they take an outing with her children, her husband returns. Not much happens, but as Alice Munro says, “What happens as event doesn’t really much matter. When the event becomes the thing that matters, the story isn’t working too well.”
So we keep looking.
I first wanted to read this story as Hetty's dream-fantasy. The title hints at that, and the opening had me wondering right away: the surreal notion of Hetty’s old lover, Heneker, showing up twenty yards away on the shore, then sitting down beside Hetty and at once holding her . . . feet? And then he "put his forehead to them"? Definitely a dream. The next clue is that Hetty escapes to sit beside her car, in the red ants, while her little children are still in the water. I don't know the Irish coast, but would a mother really do that?
Much of Hetty and Heneker's interaction seems to hover between the real world and something beyond. During one evening visit, Hetty goes to comfort her son during his bad dream and then she "drift[s]" back to Heneker, who is gone, as if their encounter had also been a dream. While references to specific times—"next day" or "that evening"—suggest we are in linear, conscious time, "There was the sense that all about the holiday house lay miles of silence, darkness, the ancient mountains inland making a long barricade against the usual world." The blended meaning of her "parting," both in her hair and her leaving him, is also of a dreamlike quality. Similarly, the tableaux that Hetty observes conjures the numinous: of her children Sophie and Andy, and Heneker, "reflectively together, illuminated, at peace," and the very image of Heneker himself, like an "icon." The fishermen on the beach are described as "dressed in ageless clothes. They had very ancient faces. But for the plastic bag they might have been ghosts." There is a blurring of then and now throughout. When Hetty wakes to the ringing telephone, she thinks: “It was ten years ago.” Even the chores she often works on, folding or piling clothes, are the same tasks worked at when she and Heneker were together, as if she’s never woken up from her former life.
Right before their final encounter, the setting sun "turned the room to glory, lighting up a filmy silvery peaty dust on the old furniture, making a great vase of flowers and leaves she had gathered yesterday glow rose red. 'It's like a dream,' she thought,” and she seems to sleepwalk her way outside the house to elements of the landscape heretofore unnoticed: an overgrown fishpond, long-empty stables with trees growing through the roofs, three sheep.
There is, in fact, an awful lot of sleeping here for one story. Even on the beach while her children are in the water, or in the house, wide-open and vulnerable to the I.R.A., Hetty sleeps through the danger, as she still sleeps, after ten years, thinking of Heneker every day, through the fact that their love was always, and remains, doomed, and her real life is one with children and her husband, Charles. Perhaps it is a gentle, good life with a man “who always saw [her] right home to the door.” Charles pours tea for her at the end, “delicately” placing the drawing on the desk, without jealousy or anger. This is quite a contrast to Heneker’s demand, “Sleep with me” or the way he “threw” his drawing at her.
But once Charles returns, Hetty is pulled from what her friend Cathie Bartlett calls Hetty’s “trance,” and it becomes clear that we haven’t been in a dream, but have rather been experiencing the dreamlike quality, beautifully illumined by Gardam, of remembered love. Hetty’s neighborhood friends have spotted her and Heneker in the pub. The barmaid, observed earlier, has run off with him. And Hetty is like her child, under the influence of a bad dream. When Charles picks up the drawing of her sleeping, she demands not once, but seven times: “Give me that,” snatching at that elusive dream thread that the mind can't hold. Charles urges, as if she had been dreaming the whole while, “Sweet Hetty, wake up soon.” I can read his refusal to hand over the drawing as a controlling gesture, but I find compassion in it too. He won't hand her such sadness.
I know I’ll continue to find more worth exploring in subsequent readings, starting with Hetty’s other lost dream of becoming a painter herself. I look forward to that. But this has already been such a satisfying read, in part because our past affairs are never revisited this intensely—oh, but how we dream they might be.
And what, after all, is a short story, or our experience of romantic love, but a dream?