‘I want to read about women who can’t make things.’
In Hannah Regel’s debut novel The Last Sane Woman, Nicola Long is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London.
‘I want to read about women who can’t make things.’
‘I’m not sure I understand?’ said Marcella Goodwoman, raising a hand to adjust her crocodile clip and gathering the thin grey hairs that had fallen to her neck. A stack of pink cardboard document folders teetered behind her. In a far corner, peeling paint shimmered in the steam above a recently boiled kettle.
On her way to the Feminist Assembly, Nicola Long had worked on this request, rephrasing it in her head until the sentiment felt correct. Now she’d said it aloud, she could hear how vague it sounded. That morning, watching a child attempt to blow bubbles from a tube for the first time, it had made perfect sense. I want you to blow me some bubbles, she had said in her kindest voice. I want you to be happy, I want you to know how. You dip the wand in the liquid, take it out carefully and blow. No, not like that. That’s too fast. No, you’re holding it too tight. If you tilt it, it will spill. No, not on the carpet. You have to blow outwards, like this. Not in your mouth, please don’t eat it, not rough like that, not upside down or in your eye, not with two hands it will fall. No, you’re not listening. You are doing it wrong, you are using it wrong. Stop.
Marcella finished with her clip and set her hands patiently on her lap, waiting for an explanation. ‘I want to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person from making things, making art, I mean. Like money,’ Nicola added, ‘or time.’
Doubt.
‘Yes. I see. We have a scroll from a Gazelle workshop at the Tate Modern.’ Marcella got up from her chair and left the room to enter the archive’s store. She returned some minutes later carrying a heavy reel of paper. ‘It was laid out as a tablecloth,’ she explained as she unrolled it onto the cramped central desk in the reading room, ‘Everyone invited sat down, took up a pen, and wrote out what had stopped them from working.’ The paper tablecloth had the words ‘money’ and ‘children’ written on it again and again in thick black marker.
‘What kind of artists were they at the table?’
‘Mostly organisers, educators.’
No good, thought Nicola. Too proactive. She wanted to wallow, and this seemed like too much of an exercise in trying to live.
‘No, it needs to be about objects. About women who can’t make things.’ She wanted the blunt difficulty of being faced with a mass. When she said the word things she took her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and knocked it against the desk. Marcella moved her head to show she had understood and was rethinking, then began to roll the tablecloth back up. It was covered in post-it notes that elaborated on the words ‘money’ and ‘children’ and they were coming unstuck as she fumbled, their glue diminished from the years.
‘Okay. Now, let’s think . . . There are the letters,’
Marcella said before wandering off again. A post-it note with the word ‘debt’ written on it had found its way onto her calf. Nicola watched it wiggle away. Marcella returned, struggling this time with a large cardboard archival box. Grey, roughly a metre squared, and seven or so inches deep.
‘Sensitive material,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘I only show the letters to people I know the F. A. can trust.’
Nicola beamed inwardly at the flattery. This was the first time they had met, and after the tablecloth’s unrolling and rerolling, she felt she had been a nuisance. But apparently not. She straightened her back and nodded as solemnly as she could to show she was, as assumed, trustworthy. Was she not, after all, a woman, standing in an archive dedicated to women’s art? She was present, and therefore good.
‘It’s difficult, you see, because of her death. When she was alive she was a ceramicist, a potter.’
Nicola was interested now. With her thumb she pushed up the lid of the box, now set between them in one of the light wood study carrels that lined the room’s edge. It was crammed full of envelopes. Why because of her death? Nicola was about to ask, but Marcella went on speaking.
‘She took her own life. They were donated to us after she died by the woman she was writing to. It’s all one-sided, here.’ Marcella then leant around Nicola to make a gap between the tightly packed envelopes with two fingers. She repeated this gesture several times to show that the addressee was the same on each one: Susan, Susan, Susan, Susan.
‘You have until six.’ Marcella left Nicola alone and returned to her office at the other end of the narrow room, shutting the door behind her. Nicola lifted the lid. Inside were hundreds of envelopes organised in bundles and tied together with string.
Each bundle must have held at least thirty letters and had a small card marker wedged into it with the year stamped on: 1976, 1977, 1978, and so on, until they stopped at 1988. This was stationery stationery: pastel envelopes with floral designs, foliage and sunset stripes. Pink and cream and pasty yellow. They seemed almost to giggle, inside their stale grey box. Nicola lifted out the first envelope, which was the colour of blush, and turned it over in her hand. Then she put it down on the desk and stared. She recognised the address: 42 Dewfield Road, Basford, Nottingham. Not precisely, not the exact house, but she knew it. She could picture the hazy red bricks and the squat, raised front lawns, sprouting weeds. It was not far from where she’d been born, and where her mother, a dentist’s assistant nearing sixty, still lived. She pulled the letter out with quick fingers and began to read.
Dear Susan,
I found the most beautiful letter set at the craft market and couldn’t resist, even though I don’t really have anyone to write to. Everyone I know I could practically summon with a tin can. But then I thought to myself, what about Susan? You’re far enough away. So, here we are. You better be game and write back! I will ask you lots of flattering questions so you have to. I want this to go on forever and then when we’re very, very old we can look back on it and read about all the men we’ve eaten and forgotten and you’ll thank me for having such a good idea!
I know I saw you for your birthday, but what about after . . . any changes? Twenty-one, eh?
Nicola did some rough arithmetic. Assuming she was still alive, Susan would be her mother’s age, give or take a few years. But the other woman, the other woman did not live, which would make her Nicola’s. ‘I like her,’ Nicola said as she helped Marcella carry the letters back into the store after being summoned at six o’clock, ‘I really like . . .’ She was stopped by the fact that
despite spending a long afternoon of parties and boyfriends and late period scares with her, she did not know the potter’s name, who signed off only with love, or a kiss. Nicola hadn’t noticed before, but she saw now that the name on the box was Susan Baddeley. The Susan Baddeley Papers. Odd, she thought. Surely they belong to the potter? But then she supposed not.
‘Oh, I’m glad, dear. She’s been here for so long, it’s about time someone paid her some attention.’ Marcella spoke about the potter as if the box and its contents were her person. When Nicola asked her name, Marcella looked up at the ceiling and paused dramatically. ‘No, sorry, it’s gone. I did know it. Age, unfortunately. Terrible thing. If you want to carry on reading them,’ she continued, ‘you can put your name down here to reserve them.’
She pointed to a weekly diary which, like everything else in the archive – the caramel-coloured filing cabinets, the waxed wooden desks – looked tragically old-fashioned. A slither of red ribbon kept the diary in time. Marcella ran her wrist along the centre fold so that it stayed open on her desk. Once it was flattened between them she explained to Nicola how it worked.
‘You write your name down here, and the resource you want to look at, here. If someone has written their name and the name of what you’d like to look at on a particular day, then you’ll have to pick another time to come in. If you want something urgently, it’s usually best to plan ahead.’
Nicola looked down at the analogue week. There were no other names.
‘Done,’ she said, pointing to where she had written her name next to Susan Baddeley’s for the remaining weekdays.
‘OK,’ squinting, ‘Nicola. See you tomorrow.’
‘Is it very sad?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Is it very sad when she dies?’
‘I haven’t read them, dear. You’ll have to tell me.’
Nicola liked her too, Marcella. She had a way about her, a way like maybe she did know. Nicola was glad she didn’t tell. She didn’t want the potter to die, at least not yet, not like that: conversationally. She wanted to keep coming back.
— An edited excerpt from The Last Sane Woman, a novel by Hannah Regel.
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