“This Elizabeth”

[Note: “This Elizabeth” is a short story as imagined having been written by Valery Rockford after the events and timeline of the coda of The Fourth Winter. It is presented here as part of an imagined short story collection titled The Books Between Us: Beyond Echo and Shadow, possibly authored by her.]

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“This Elizabeth”

Valery Elizabeth Rockford

 

Michaelmas, 1986. She became Veronica at Oxford.

Isabel was her mother’s name, but everyone called her either Izzy or just Mom. Why her parents had named her after her mother she was never told, and by the time she was old enough to ask it had somehow become one of those questions whose answer could only disappoint. Her sister, older than her, had been named Regina, so it made little sense that she had not been the one to become the torchbearer. There might have been a grandmother involved, although none of them had also been named Isabel. There might have been a promise made one romantic evening between her parents that subsequently led to her birth. There might simply have been a shortage of imagination. She loved her mother, but she would stand in no one’s shadow.

So when the first form was put in front of her at Oxford she wrote Veronica. She wrote it again on the next one, and again on the card that identified her to somebody whose face she had forgotten by dinner. At Hall that evening a young man asked whether Veronica would pass the salt, and she did. That was apparently all becoming someone took.

She had expected resistance. She had prepared arguments. She had imagined telephone calls home, administrative objections, perhaps some elderly don examining her over the rims of his spectacles and asking what exactly was wrong with Isabel. Nobody cared. By the end of her first week everyone she knew called her Veronica.

It turned out that becoming Veronica involved rather more paperwork than Oxford required. Within a few weeks she wrote home for the documents she needed, filled out the forms for British Columbia, and posted them back across the Atlantic to the Registrar. She did not erase Isabel altogether. That would have felt too much like punishing her mother for something her mother had never done. Instead she moved it one place to the right. When the papers came back, she was Veronica Isabel, legally as well as everywhere else that mattered. Isabel remained hers but no longer stood in front.

Finding out what she was required to do proved nearly as laborious as doing it. There was no convenient oracle to tell a Canadian living in Oxford what British Columbia required of her. There were telephone calls made while calculating the time in Vancouver, letters to government offices, letters home asking her parents to obtain something that could only conveniently be obtained there and return envelopes containing forms that generated requests for still other forms. Her parents became, for several months, an unofficial branch office in Vancouver while Veronica attempted to coordinate the whole business from Oxford.

The Canadian passport was another matter, and Britain had already admitted Isabel as a student. There were certified copies and explanations to people whose principal concern was that the woman named in one document remained demonstrably the woman named in another. Her passport had to catch up with British Columbia, and the Home Office had to catch up with her passport. By the time Oxford had altered its own records, she had acquired a practical education in the proposition that changing a name was easy only until governments became interested.

At twelve, she had spent hours at the Vancouver Public Library working through microfilm reels of The Province, looking for some sign that her parents had announced her birth, and found none. Apparently one could arrive in the world without attracting much documentary attention at all. Choosing a different name was another matter. That required fees, declarations, supporting papers, and a public notice announcing that one intended to become, officially, what one had already decided to call oneself. Throughout the process, what pocket money she had disappeared into those fees, postage, telephone calls and certified copies. For months she could not once stand the next round when she was out drinking with her mates.

She found one part of the whole business increasingly funny. Had she married and taken somebody else’s surname, much of the machinery seemed prepared to regard the change as perfectly ordinary. But because she had altered her own name for no reason more institutionally legible than that she wished to, every office wanted evidence, explanation, continuity and another copy of something already sent elsewhere. Apparently a woman could become somebody’s wife with considerably less administrative anxiety than she could become herself.

There was a satisfaction in that which surprised her. She had not repudiated the woman she had been named for, nor pretended the first twenty years had happened to somebody else. She had simply decided which name would answer the door. From then on, official forms, passports, degrees, bank accounts and whatever other apparatus the world accumulated around a person could begin with Veronica. Isabel could remain where she had chosen to put it: present, acknowledged, and no longer mistaken for the whole of her.

By Christmas the people who had never known her as anything else outnumbered those who had, and she went home to discover that Isabel had become a person who lived largely in her parents’ house.

Her mother tried. “Veronica,” Izzy would say, with a slight pause beforehand, as if selecting the correct fork. Her father forgot more often. Neither of them made a battle of it, which was almost disappointing. At twenty, Veronica had assumed that becoming oneself ought to involve resistance. Instead, it involved forms. From then on, she was Veronica, and that was the way it was always gonna be.

Elizabeth arrived sometime after Hilary. Veronica could never later remember whether they had met at a seminar, in a college bar, or because somebody had borrowed somebody else’s book and failed to return it. Oxford friendships often presented themselves after the fact as though they had always existed. One week there was no Elizabeth. The next she was sitting cross-legged on Veronica’s floor, arguing that the coffee was undrinkable while drinking it anyway.

Elizabeth was tall, dark-haired, and possessed of a kind of seriousness that did not prevent her from being funny. She listened before she spoke, which made Veronica nervous at first. Most people seemed to spend the time while others were talking arranging their own replies. Elizabeth appeared actually to be listening, and therefore sometimes answered the thing you had said rather than the thing you had intended.

The first time Veronica called her Beth, Elizabeth corrected her.

“Elizabeth.”

Veronica looked up from the book she was pretending to read. “Sorry?”

“My name. Elizabeth.”

“Right.”

A week later she did it again. “Beth, have you got—”

“Elizabeth.”

“Yes. Elizabeth. Have you got my Derrida?”

“I have this Derrida,” she said, pointing to the book she was holding.

“My Derrida has my notes in it.”

Elizabeth opened it and fanned through the pages. “Then I have your Derrida.”

Veronica took the book back and forgot the correction before she reached the staircase. Beth was what you called Elizabeth. This was not a proposition she had ever examined. There were Elizabeths who were Liz, certainly, and at least one Betty she had known at school, although Betty had been sixty and therefore seemed to belong to a different taxonomy. But Beth was friendly. Beth was intimate without being childish. Elizabeth was something a headmistress called you before explaining why she had asked you into her office. The distinction seemed obvious. Elizabeth disagreed.

It might have remained one of the small abrasions by which friendships announce that two people are not, in fact, the same person, had Veronica not used the name one night in front of six other people and two bottles of wine.

They were in somebody’s rooms. She could remember the fireplace but not whose fireplace it was. There were books stacked on the mantel because there were always books stacked on mantels, windowsills, radiators and the floor. Somebody had brought a bottle of something red whose label contained a château no one there could have afforded to visit. Somebody else had brought two more bottles because intellectual seriousness did not preclude planning. The argument had begun with Barthes and become, as arguments did after eleven, about nearly everything else.

“Beth was saying yesterday—”

“Elizabeth.”

Veronica kept talking. “—that the problem with Hirsch is—”

“My name is Elizabeth.”

This time the room stopped. Not completely. One of the men near the fire continued trying to open another bottle with an inadequate corkscrew. Someone else gave a small laugh, the reflexive kind produced when people suspect a joke and do not want to be the last to recognize it.

Veronica looked across at her. “I know your name.”

“Then use it.”

There was enough wine in Veronica by then that any embarrassment converted almost instantly into argument. “I do use it.”

“You call me Beth.”

“Well, yes, but everyone calls Elizabeth Beth.”

Elizabeth stared at her. “No,” she said. “You call me Beth.”

The young man with the corkscrew stopped struggling. Veronica could feel every person in the room discovering urgent reasons to examine glasses, books, shoes, fire.

“That’s what I meant.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Don’t.”

It was the quietness of that word that finally irritated her. “I’m not trying to rename you.”

“You already did.”

“For God’s sake, Elizabeth.”

The name sounded absurdly formal in her mouth, almost accusatory. Elizabeth stood and took her coat from the back of a chair.

“See? You can do it.”

She left. Nobody spoke for several seconds, and then the cork came out of the bottle with a small victorious pop.

Veronica drank more than she should have after that, partly because the evening had been spoiled and partly because she suspected that she had spoiled it. The next morning she remembered the conversation in fragments: the room, the fire, the cork, Elizabeth’s face. She also remembered enough of her own indignation to be embarrassed by it. Her first defence was that Elizabeth had overreacted. Her second was that everyone shortened names. Her third was that she had meant affectionately.

The third lasted longest.

Intention mattered. Surely intention had to matter. Otherwise language was an ambush and friendship impossible. This argument survived breakfast. It did not survive Isabel.

She was walking back across college when the thought arrived without invitation: I know your name. That was what she had said. Her father knew her name too. Her mother knew it better than anyone. Neither fact entitled them to call her Isabel once she had told them she was Veronica.

She stopped beneath an archway and stood there long enough that two people walked around her. The obviousness of it was infuriating. Elizabeth had not accused her of hatred, mockery or malice. She had told her what she was called. Veronica had answered that everyone knew better. After that, philosophy became involved, which was probably unnecessary.

Wittgenstein had already been causing trouble. Somewhere in the course of the work that was still being called a DPhil then, she had begun to understand that choosing Veronica had not been an act of discovering a hidden true name waiting inside her. She had introduced a word into the practice of her life. She had written it, spoken it, answered to it. Others had learned its use. The name had become hers because that was what they did with it.

This pleased her enormously for several weeks. Derrida ruined it.

If Veronica could travel from a form to a dinner table, from her mouth to someone else’s, from Oxford to a letter addressed by somebody who had never met her, then the name worked precisely because it did not belong solely to the moment in which she had chosen it. It could be repeated without her, mispronounced without her, written about her when she was not in the room. It could survive contexts she had never intended. She spent most of a term trying to reconcile this with Wittgenstein. Roland Barthes did not help much. E. D. Hirsch did not help at all.

The matter became steadily more complicated while her own practical behaviour remained embarrassingly simple: when she saw Elizabeth, she called her Elizabeth. Elizabeth did not thank her. They did not discuss the evening by the fire. The friendship continued with the slight alteration produced whenever one person discovers that the other has a boundary and intends to keep it.

Then one night, some months later, there was wine again. Not the same rooms. Not the same people. Veronica remembered rain against the window and somebody attempting to make toast beneath a grill that had probably not been cleaned since Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. She and Elizabeth had ended up on the floor with their backs against a sofa while three other people argued about whether revolution required optimism.

Paulo Freire entered the conversation. Veronica would later blame him for what followed, although this was unfair.

They talked about naming the world. They talked about who was permitted to describe whom, who possessed the vocabulary in which a life could become intelligible, and whether accepting someone else’s language was necessarily accepting their authority. At some point Veronica began talking about Isabel. She did not normally.

“My mother’s Isabel,” she said.

Elizabeth looked at her. “So were you?”

“I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

“I was.”

“And you changed it.”

“Yes. At great personal and physical expense.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to.”

Elizabeth waited. “That’s it?”

“What else should there be?”

“I don’t know. You’ve spent half the year reading people who seem to think there should be.”

Veronica laughed. “That’s different.”

“Why?”

Because Wittgenstein. Because Derrida. Because Barthes. Because Hirsch. Because language, intention, iteration, authority, and the infinitely receding possibility that everything important could be made more difficult by acquiring another book. Instead, she poured the remainder of the wine into her glass. The whole ordeal did not leave her with a bob enough to offer any of those gentlemen a pint.

“It was my decision to make.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Yes.”

Veronica waited for qualification. None came.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. That’s my final proposition.”

It was astonishingly unsatisfactory. They finished the wine.

The hangover she had the next morning set the matter in stone.

After that Veronica stopped trying to reconcile herself with anybody. Not entirely, of course. Nobody who remained at Oxford long enough ever stopped reconciling things that had behaved quite adequately before theory arrived. But she stopped requiring a philosophical warrant for the name.

It was hers because she had chosen it. That did not mean she owned what everyone might someday make of it. It did not mean the name contained her. It did not even mean Isabel had ceased to exist in every meaningful sense. Isabel remained on old school records, in birthday cards stored at her parents’ house, in the occasional startled summons from her father when he was angry or frightened.

Veronica was the name she had chosen under which the rest of her life would accumulate. It was enough.

Near the end of her time at Oxford, Elizabeth gave her a book. They were standing outside after lunch. Veronica remembered sunlight, which probably meant it had not been raining for at least ten minutes. Elizabeth took the book from her bag and handed it over without ceremony.

It was a small copy of The Little Prince.

Veronica looked at the cover. “I’ve read this.”

“I assumed you had.”

“When I was about twelve.”

“That might be the problem.”

“What problem?”

Elizabeth smiled. “You’ll find one.”

Veronica opened it. On the title page Elizabeth had written:

For Veronica,  
from this Elizabeth. My Prop. 7.

Veronica looked up. “That’s pointed.”

“Yes.”

“I thought we were over that.”

“We are.”

“Then why—”

“Because we’re over it.”

Veronica closed the book. She had learned by then that Elizabeth sometimes answered questions in ways that became clearer only after one stopped trying to extract further answers from them.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

They saw each other several times after that. Veronica was certain of this because there were memories which must have happened later, although none carried dates: Elizabeth in a library doorway, Elizabeth laughing because Veronica had badly misquoted somebody, Elizabeth borrowing a scarf and returning it two weeks later smelling faintly of tobacco although she claimed not to smoke.

Then the MPhil was finished and Veronica went to San Francisco.

There was nothing mysterious about the separation. They knew she was leaving. There were the usual promises about writing, addresses exchanged with every intention of being used, and the assumption that people who had once occupied the same few Oxford streets could maintain a friendship across an ocean because neither of them had yet accumulated enough evidence to the contrary.

For a while there were letters. Then there were fewer. Veronica was building a life in San Francisco; Elizabeth was building whatever life Elizabeth had chosen elsewhere. No quarrel ended the correspondence. Nobody failed some decisive test of friendship. The distance simply acquired years.

What Veronica did not know when she left Oxford was that she had already seen Elizabeth for the last time.

She kept the book. That surprised her. She lost other things. Books disappeared by the dozens over the years, lent to people who denied borrowing them, abandoned in flats, left in offices, packed into boxes that never emerged intact at the other end. She sold books when she needed money and gave them away when she did not. Whole shelves passed through her hands without acquiring memory. But The Little Prince crossed the Atlantic with her and remained.

She reread it eventually, not at Oxford, not because Elizabeth had told her to, and not all at once. She discovered the inscription first, years later, opening the book while looking for something else. By then the handwriting struck her before the words did. She had forgotten the angle of Elizabeth’s letters, the long stroke of the final h, the way her capitals seemed slightly too large for the rest of the line.

From this Elizabeth.

She sat with the book open on her knees. There were thousands of roses; she had remembered that much. As a child she had thought the lesson was that one rose became important because you loved it. As an adult she saw something more difficult in it. Categories were real enough to be useful. Roses were roses. Elizabeths were Elizabeths. Names allowed the world to be spoken of without beginning again each time.

But no category absolved you from meeting the particular thing in front of you. No number of Elizabeths made this Elizabeth Beth, and no number of Isabels made her Isabel.

She wondered then whether Elizabeth had known exactly what she was giving her. Probably. Then again, perhaps not. That was another habit Oxford had taken years to cure: the belief that anything worth understanding must have been deliberately put there by somebody, as if there were some occult teleology involved. The inscription did not tell her, and Elizabeth was no longer alive to explain it.